washington, Aug 10 (Inditop.com) Women holding supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, says the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.
“This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,” said Heather McLaughlin, sociologist at the University of Minnesota (U-M) and principal study investigator.
“Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power,” added McLaughlin.
The study reveals that nearly 50 percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace.
Significantly, men who looked or acted feminine were more likely to have experienced harassment than less feminine men. More feminine men were at a greater risk of experiencing more severe or multiple forms of sexual harassment (as were female supervisors).
In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.
McLaughlin and her co-authors examined data from the 2003 and 2004 waves of the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school district and has
continued near annually since.
Respondents were approximately 29 and 30 years old during the 2003 and 2004 waves. The analysis was supplemented with in-depth interviews with a subset of the YDS survey respondents.
The sociologists found that, in addition to workplace power, gender expression was a strong predictor of workplace harassment.
These findings will be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
