Summary of Findings

Click here to view the companion #NowWhat: The Sexual Harassment Solutions Toolkit.

Sexual harassment is everywhere.

More than four decades after the term “sexual harassment” was first coined to describe unwanted, hostile harassing behavior based on one’s sex, the team at the Better Life Lab analyzed an extensive collection of data and research to draw a more complete picture of the incidence and experience of sexual harassment in the workplace. We have not only focused on professional settings, which have garnered the most media and public attention, but also extended our analysis across all sectors. By dividing industries by gender ratio and wage, we also sought to understand the factors that drive sexual harassment, finding that some are common across all sectors, and others unique to a particular sector. We found that sexual harassment in the workplace remains a severe, pervasive, and troublingly unresolved problem. Even as women comprise nearly half the workforce, sexual harassment persists in virtually every sector of the economy, from male-dominated to female-dominated industries and workplaces, and from low-wage and precarious jobs to high-wage professions.

Sexual harassment is systemic.

Sexual harassment isn't something that just happens because of fleeting circumstance or desire. It is driven in all sectors by imbalances in power. Men hold far more positions of power in all sectors of the economy. Even in female-dominated fields, men are more likely to be supervisors, principals, and managers. In all fields, race and racism add another layer to systemic power imbalances.

Impacts of sexual harassment are felt beyond just the harassing interaction.

This analysis shows that no sector remains untouched by sexual harassment, nor unaffected by its impacts. Sexual harassment damages the lives, health, prospects, financial independence, and opportunities of its victims, and costs businesses not only legal fees, but lost productivity, morale, effectiveness, and talent. Tolerating or failing to adequately respond to sexual harassment can block women’s and other targets’ economic security, access to opportunity, and advancement, which serves to preserve the status quo and power imbalances that drive sexual harassment in the first place.

Women are the most common, but not the only, targets for sexual harassment.

There are basic patterns for sexual harassment, but those patterns do not capture the variations in experience by different groups of people and by workers in different sectors. The data shows that across all sectors, women of lower status are the most common targets of sexual harassment by perpetrators, who are typically men of higher status. But sexual harassment in the workplace is by no means limited to this dynamic. Men, particularly those who don’t conform to traditional masculine norms, and others seen as outsiders, like LGBTQ and gender nonconforming people, can be targets. Women can be harassers. People of color, especially women of color, are more likely to be subject to sexual harassment than their white counterparts.

It’s not just bosses and co-workers who are doing the harassing.

In nearly every sector, we found that it’s not just managers, supervisors, and those in power who sexually harass targets. Harassment can come from coworkers, as is the case for some hostile work environment claims. Sexual harassment is also common from third parties. That’s true for fast-food restaurant workers in the low-wage arena, who can be harassed by customers, and for nurses, doctors, and healthcare workers who can be harassed by patients. It’s also true for highly paid lawyers, who can be sexually harassed by opposing counsel, clients, and judges.

Gaps in labor and civil rights laws create vulnerability to sexual harassment among large numbers of Americans.

A swath of workers across all sectors are not covered by current civil rights laws, and have little or no resources to report or complain about sexual harassment. This includes independent contractors, entrepreneurs, gig workers from any sector, and agricultural and domestic workers—some of whom face additional challenges in the form of precarious immigration status. Members of Congress and other legislative bodies have also exempted themselves and their staffs from many civil rights laws.

Sexual harassment is often driven by narratives, myths, and norms about women, men and workers.

Sexual harassment is fueled, in part, by the stories we tell ourselves and the narratives that we choose to believe. Many organizations are often driven to protect perceived high performers, superstars, creative geniuses, and rainmakers at all costs, thinking that success, innovation, or survival is dependent on that one person, regardless of their behavior. Narratives around the ideal worker and the breadwinner-homemaker ideal perpetuate a gender-harassing power dynamic rooted in the belief that women and others who don’t conform to these traditional norms don’t belong and can’t compete in the work world, and that men don’t belong in caregiving. These damaging mythologies not only drive rampant sexual harassment, but foster abusive and toxic cultures that silence, sideline, and waste the talents and potential of countless targets. Denial—thinking that sexual harassment doesn’t happen in, say, female-dominated environments, or that organizations have already fixed it—is another powerful false narrative that provides fertile ground for sexual harassment to thrive.

Harassment comes in two basic varieties: gender-based sexual harassment and sex-focused sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment comes in roughly two forms: harassment that centers on sex and desire for sexual or romantic connection, and gender harassment. Gender harassment is generally not about sexual attraction or sexuality. Gender-harassing physical, verbal, and symbolic behaviors insult and degrade one’s gender in an effort to assert power, control behavior, or force those who don’t conform out of a particular job or out of the profession entirely. Workers across industries experience these different types of sexual harassment, some of which cross the legal standard of either quid pro quo harassment, or harassment that is so severe and pervasive that it constitutes a hostile work environment that negatively impacts one’s work. But others experience harassment—usually gender harassment—that doesn’t necessarily meet the legal standard but still has a negative impact on the work life of many individuals and on workplace cultures.

The cost of leaving jobs is high for many, which can embolden harassers, keep targets silent, and normalize sexual harassment

Workers in the low-wage sector may tolerate sexual harassment because they need their jobs to survive and have few options. Male-dominated blue collar jobs pay better than jobs in female-dominated sectors and the gender pay gap between men and women is among the smallest of any sector. So targets—and bystanders—may sometimes ignore sexual harassment, or refuse to file a complaint, for fear of losing a good-paying job with the promise of a foothold in the middle class. Higher-wage professionals may also stay in toxic, sexually harassing environments because they’ve invested so much education, time, and effort into building their careers, networks, or reputations, that the risk of being labelled a pariah, or ostracized, can keep victims silent. All of which create work cultures where sexually harassing behavior can become normalized.

Most reporting systems don’t work.

We found problems in every sector in the way organizations respond to sexual harassment complaints. In many settings, the system is often set up to fail, with victims required to report claims of sexual harassment through a strict chain of command that often includes perpetrators or their allies. This effectively silences victims or freezes complaints. This has been a particular problem in the military, though efforts have been made to allow confidential reports to be made outside the chain of command. But that only ensures a stopgap measure of enabling the victim to receive support, not that the perpetrator will be counseled or punished or the culture that tolerates harassment will be changed. In the tech sector, some male-dominated start-ups move so quickly that human resources and sexual harassment policies are an afterthought, at best. In low-wage settings in particular, policies and reporting systems are often murky. And many workers, because of the type of job they have (agricultural work) or legal status (undocumented), have no access to reporting at all.

We need more data.

In producing this document, we struggled to find robust, consistent data, on a national, industry, or even organizational level that systematically documented the extent of sexual harassment in the American workplace. We also struggled to find solid research on the efficacy of our arsenal of responses to it. Going forward, we need more high quality data on all levels, to further shine a light on sexual harassment and to elevate a variety of functional solutions that work across different sectors and workplaces.

Solutions must be targeted and aimed at changing culture, systems and structures.

We found that organizations typically have three primary responses to combat sexual harassment: ignoring complaints or harassment, firing a harasser, and/or offering sexual harassment training. These approaches aren’t working. Firing a harasser may solve a specific problem in the short term. Offering a canned, digital sexual harassment training, as is the norm, may protect an organization from legal liability, but does little to change its culture. Ignoring complaints and failing to recognize sexual harassment creates toxic cultures that normalize harassment. None of these strategies are enough to respond to, prevent and end sexual harassment. So what works? As a companion to this report, the Better Life Lab has produced a #NowWhat toolkit with examples, strategies, and evidence for promising solutions in combating sexual harassment—from top-down, system-level responses to granular, individual actions.