Sexual Harassment as an Exercise of Power

2012

Abstract Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, although it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. Popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, but power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets.

Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, although it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. Popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, but power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets. This article analyzes longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews from the Youth Development Study to test this idea and to delineate why and how supervisory authority, gender nonconformity, and workplace sex ratios affect harassment. Relative to nonsupervisors, female supervisors are more likely to report harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can serve as an equalizer against women in power, motivated more by control and domination than by sexual desire. Interviews point to social isolation as a mechanism linking harassment to gender nonconformity and women's authority, particularly in male-dominated work settings.

American Sociological Review, 2004

2018

The list of powerful men accused of sexual harassment seems to grow longer every day: Roger Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Steve Wynn, Mario Batali, Matt Lauer, Mario Testino, Richard Branson, Roy Moore, just to name a few. These reports tell a distressingly familiar story of unchecked power that reinforces popular understandings about who engages in sexually harassing behaviour and who is targeted. But the #MeToo movement and social science research complicate this simple narrative. Sexual harassment is experienced by both women and men. It occurs in a wide variety of work settings, from construction sites to classrooms. And while harassers are often supervisors, they are also sometimes subordinates and clients. So, what does the research tell us about these sexual harassment scenarios?

The Sociological Quarterly, 2009

Workplace harassment can be devastating for employees and damaging for organizations. In this article, we expand the literature by identifying common and distinct processes related to general workplace harassment and workplace sexual harassment. Using both structural equation modeling and in-depth case immersion, we analyze content-coded data from the full population of workplace ethnographies—ethnographies that provide in-depth information on the nature and causes of both general and sexual harassment that would ...

Journal of Social Issues, 1995

Recent research on sexually aggressive men has underscored the importance of power and dominance as a motivator of their behavior toward women. One striking feature of both sexual harassment and the misuse of power is the lack of awareness oflenders often show regarding the inappropriateness of their actions. This lack of awareness is similar to automatic or nonconscious eflects demonstrated in social perception and judgment research, such as the unintentional influence of one's stereotypes in forming impressions of others. The possibility that having power within a situation automatically and nonconsciously triggers a sexuality schema, just as racial or gender features automatically trigger stereotypes of that group, is discussed and supporting research is described. It is shown, for example, that for men likely to sexually harass, merely activating the concept of power without their knowledge causes them to find the same woman more attractive. The possible origins of the automatic power + sex link, and its implications for preventing sexual harassment behavior, are discussed. Personally, I admit that I do not easily forget these collisions with ordinary humanity. the naive misuse of power, the injustice, the sycophantic corruption. I dwelt upon the incident too much, it irritated me in retrospect-quite futilely, of course, since such phenomena are only all too natural and all too much the rule. (Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician) Reports of official corruption and the misuse of power are staples of the daily newspaper. In just the span of a few months during 1993 and 1994, Dan

2011

This paper examines female executives’ experiences of ‘contra-power sexual harassment’ (CPSH) – a situation in which the harasser possesses less formal power than the harassed – from male subordinates in the workplace. One hundred and fifteen (115) respondents, consisting of sixty-seven (67) female executives and forty-eight (48) male subordinates, were purposively selected. Two versions of a structured questionnaire in terms of the harassed and the harasser, containing eleven (11) sexual acts/behaviours were administered to the respondents. Additionally, two focused group discussions (FGDs), comprising between 6 and10 participants, were conducted with female executives and male subordinates, respectively. Data collected from the FGDs were sorted, transcribed, and reported verbatim while data from the questionnaire were analyzed, using simple frequency percentage distributions. Female executives most perceived and experienced male subordinates grabbing their groins in front of femal...

Feminist Review, 1996

Work and Occupations, 2008

This study sheds light on the organizational foundations of sexual harassment. The authors evaluated a theoretical model underscoring the influence of worker power, workplace culture, and gender composition using unique data derived from the population of English-language, book-length workplace ethnographies. The authors used ordered and multinomial logistic regression to test whether organizational explanations vary in their capacity to predict three distinct forms of sexual harassment: patronizing, taunting, and predatory conduct. The findings reveal that organizational attributes influence not only the presence of workplace sexual harassment but also the specific form in which it manifests. The result is a more conceptually refined model of sexual harassment in organizational context. The authors conclude with a discussion of the contribution of this study to sociological explanations of sexual harassment, including linkages to more recent qualitative work underscoring its complexity, and with implications for policy in light of current workplace trends.

Philosophy <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> Public Affairs, 2006