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Annual Review of Sociology
Gender, Power, and Harassment: Sociology in the #MeToo Era Abigail C. Saguy and Mallory E. Rees Department of Sociology, University of California–Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095; email: [email protected]
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2021. 47:417–35
First published as a Review in Advance on April 22, 2021
The Annual Review of Sociology is online at soc.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090320- 031147
Copyright © 2021 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
Keywords
sex-based harassment, sexual harassment, gender harassment, workplace, sex discrimination, sex segregation, power, professional hierarchy, law
Abstract
This article examines what sociological research teaches us about gender, power, and harassment in the #MeToo era, showing how the sociological literature on harassment has both shaped and been shaped by legal defini- tions and scholarship. For instance, like case law, sociological research has tended to focus on the workplace to the exclusion of harassment in other spheres such as housing, as well as on sexual forms of harassment—despite evidence that nonsexual forms of sex-based harassment are even more com- mon and just as harmful as sexual forms. While not all sociological studies of harassment employ an intersectional approach, those that do show that race and gender shape not only who is likely to be targeted but also how dif- ferent people define and understand harassment. The sociological research suggests that mainstream organizational approaches to harassment fail to re- duce rates of harassment and even elicit backlash but that some alternative approaches offer promise.
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INTRODUCTION
This article reviews the sociological literature on gender, power, and harassment in the #MeToo era—particularly in the US employment context. The term “Me too” originated in 2006, when Black activist Tarana Burke founded a nonprofit youth organization of the same name—focused on the health, well-being, and wholeness of young women of color (Garcia 2017). Over a decade later, in 2017, the hashtag went viral after three dozen women—including several famous women actors—publicly said Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had harassed, assaulted, or raped them. By saying “Me too,” millions of people shared their own experiences of harassment and as- sault so that others knew they were not alone. The “#MeToo era” refers to the years immediately following this movement (Kettrey 2019). It gestures to a time period marked by greater sensitiv- ity to the issue of sexual violence—but also backlash from those who believe women’s claims of harassment and assault have gone too far.
The #MeToo movement brought widespread attention to issues—sexual violence and harassment—that sociologists have wrestled with for decades. At the same time, the public discus- sion of harassment in the wake of #MeToo has reproduced the limits of how harassment has been conceptualized in the law, in sociology, and beyond. At this historic junction, this article evalu- ates what sociological research on gender, power, and harassment teaches us. While the #MeToo movement concerns itself with a wide range of sexual violence in all areas of social life, this ar- ticle focuses more narrowly on sociological research on harassment (for an excellent review of the sociological literature on sexual violence, see Armstrong et al. 2018). As this article shows, both US harassment law and the sociological research on harassment overwhelmingly focus on the workplace, with some attention also paid to education and housing.
The sociology of harassment is not a recognized subfield. There is no section of the Amer- ican Sociological Association dedicated to harassment, nor any sociology journals focusing on the study of harassment. Instead, sociologists from various subfields—including sociology of law, sociology of gender and sexuality, sociology of organizations, and social psychology—have all used the lenses and methodologies of their particular subfields to examine the topic. Sociolo- gists studying harassment also engage with literature from neighboring disciplines, including law, psychology, and business management. This review focuses on work published by sociologists and secondarily by legal scholars, but it is important to keep in mind that research on this topic is interdisciplinary.
We intentionally use the broad term “harassment,” rather than the narrower “sexual harass- ment.” This is consistent with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guide- lines and acknowledges both that harassment can take sexual and nonsexual forms and that sex- based and race-based harassment often work in tandem.Below,we sometimes refer more narrowly to sexual harassment when discussing work that uses this specific term to discuss harassing behav- ior of a sexual nature. This article reviews important lessons from the literature and points to areas that would benefit from greater sociological investigation.
US LEGAL FOUNDATIONS
The term sexual harassment did not exist before 1975, when it emerged from a consciousness- raising session that American author, journalist, and feminist Lin Farley organized as part of a university course on women and work (Farley 1978). Until then, there was no name for the kind of indignities that so many women (and others) faced in the workplace (MacKinnon 1979). Many women assumed that sexist comments, disparaging remarks, and even physical and sexual assault were the price they had to pay for working in amale-dominated workplace. Farley andMacKinnon
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focused primarily on sexualized forms of harassment, coining the term sexual harassment and defining it as a group-based harm worthy of legal recourse.
How activists, legal scholars, journalists, sociologists, and others came to define sexual harass- ment in the United States and abroad is a fruitful sociological question (Saguy 2003). Consistent with Saguy (2003), this review does not offer a single definition of harassment. Rather, it examines how US courts and (mostly US-based) sociologists have defined this issue, how definitions have shifted over time, and what is at stake in struggles over legal and sociological definitions. The historical record shows that early legal definitions subsequently shaped popular understandings and sociological conceptions of harassment. In her influential book, Sexual Harassment of Work- ing Women, MacKinnon (1979, p. 1) defined sexual harassment as “the unwanted imposition of sexual requirements in the context of a relationship of unequal power,” arguing that “practices which express and reinforce the social inequality of women to men are clear cases of sex-based discrimination.” As such,MacKinnon argued that sexual harassment violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans employers with 15 or more employees from discriminating on the basis of sex. MacKinnon strategically used Title VII to elevate sexual harassment to the gravity of racial discrimination—the quintessential form of group-based discrimination in American law and public consciousness. MacKinnon (1979) argued that the government had a greater obliga- tion to protect women in the workplace than elsewhere because work is tied to women’s economic survival.
MacKinnon (1979) defined two types of harassment that were later codified by the EEOC, the major federal agency responsible for creating and enforcing policies to implement Title VII, and that were subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986). The first, quid pro quo harassment, applied to situations in which “sexual compliance is exchanged, or proposed to be exchanged, for an employment opportunity” (MacKinnon 1979, p. 32). The second, condition of work harassment—later termed hostile work environment—referred to situ- ations “in which sexual harassment simply makes the work environment unbearable” (MacKinnon 1979, p. 40). Much sociological research takes these two different forms of harassment as a point of departure, while other legal and sociological work offers competing definitions.
LEGAL DEBATES
Following the publication of MacKinnon’s pioneering work, new generations of legal scholars offered competing definitions of harassment based on alternative theories—many informed by sociological research—about why harassment violates Title VII. Legal scholar Vicki Schultz (2018, p. 33) argued that MacKinnon’s narrow emphasis on “male-to-female, unwanted sexual advances blinds us to the pervasive and pernicious nonsexual forms of sexism and harassment that women and others experience,” which she argued should be included in the legal definition of harassment (see also Epstein 1998, Franke 1997). By this logic, harassment is a tool of workplace sexism, not an instrument of sexual coercion. It communicates to women and other marginalized workers that they do not belong in masculine spheres of work, sabotaging their work performance (Schultz 1998).
In response to these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshorer Services (1998, p. 80) that not all sexually tinged conduct amounts to harassment and that some harassers may be motivated by “general hostility” to women or other marginalized workers in the workplace. But other, lower courts continue to insist that harassment involves sexual forms of behavior (Leskinen et al. 2011), potentially raising the bar for employees who have experienced nonsexual forms of harassment.
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Although legal definitions have shifted to take account of nonsexual forms of harassment, pop- ular perceptions of harassment remain rooted in the sexual desire–domination paradigm (Schultz 2018). News media reporting on HarveyWeinstein, for instance, focused on accusations of sexual assault, underreporting “the nonsexual, but still utterly sexist, forms of abuse Weinstein heaped upon less influential women who worked for him” (Schultz 2018, p. 35). These included berating women employees with gender-based obscenities and forcing them to perform domestic labor as part of their job.The press also rarely discussed howWeinstein used homophobic slurs to degrade men employees (Schultz 2018). Sociologists’ understandings of harassment are likely informed by these popular understandings as well as by the law.
Yet, some legal scholars argue that the #MeToo movement has rapidly changed people’s beliefs about what behaviors constitute harassment, leading them to include a broader range of behaviors under the umbrella of harassment (Williams et al. 2019). They show how judges previously dis- missed harassment claims without a jury trial based on outdated court precedents, setting a high bar for what behaviors constitute harassment. They argue that judges now should allow juries to determine what behaviors constitute unlawful harassment, taking into account contemporary community standards (Williams et al. 2019). A 2017 Gallup poll found that, compared with people in 1998, people in 2017 were more likely to consider sexual harassment a major problem (73% of women and 66% of men, compared with 55% and 45%, respectively, in 1998) and that women were more likely to sue for harassment (Saad 2017).
Finally, legal scholars have criticized Title VII case law for failing to account for people’s intersectional experiences of sex- and race-based harassment. Legal scholar Katherine Franke (1997, p. 744) argues that harassment can be used to enforce racial subordination, just as rape has historically been “a weapon of racial terror” against Black women (citing critical race le- gal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989, p. 58). Similarly, legal scholar Angela Onwuachi-Willig (2018) has recently argued that, in the #MeToo era, public responses have privileged and empha- sizedWhite women’s experiences while insufficiently accounting for howBlack women experience harassment.
HOW LEGAL UNDERSTANDINGS SHAPE SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO HARASSMENT
Sociological studies of harassment both are shaped by legal definitions and inform legal scholar- ship. Just as US legal scholars and case law have focused on harassment primarily in the workplace and secondarily in education, so too has most sociological research on harassment. But should the law get to decide what constitutes harassment? Below, we discuss sociological research examining (a) whether we should focus on sexual harassment or on a wider range of sex-based harassment; (b) who is most likely to be harassed; (c) how social factors, such as gender and race, shape how people understand harassment; and (d) how organizational- and national-level factors shape un- derstandings of harassment.
Sexual Versus Sex-Based Harassment
US case law has prioritized sexual forms of harassment over nonsexual sex-based forms. Indeed, broad use of the term sexual harassment has institutionalized an emphasis on sexual advances. In response, some scholars have called for a shift in terminology to sex-based harassment (Berdahl 2007a, Leskinen et al. 2011) or gender harassment (Franke 1997) to recognize harassing behavior that is not sexual in nature.We agree that moving away from the terminology of sexual harassment toward sex-based harassment, gender harassment, or harassment generally would offer analytical
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clarity and help rectify the tendency to focus on sexualized harassment at the expense of nonsexual forms of sex-based harassment.
In fact, sociological research shows that people are more likely to experience nonsexual forms of sex-based harassment than unwanted sexual advances (Kalof et al. 2001, Leskinen et al. 2011). For example, men often make sexist jokes to build masculine solidarity and cast women as out- siders (Quinn 2000). Men use these jokes to justify women’s exclusion from masculine workplace cultures (Collinson & Collinson 1996). And when women of color are the target of harassment, the behavior is often racist as well as sexist. Some research has also shown that disadvantaged Black high school boys have “an arsenal of derogatory gendered terms at their disposal when in verbal altercations with [Black high school girls], with the weight of gender inequality in their favor” (Miller 2008, p. 75). Boys may deploy these terms along with “other forms of gendered mis- treatment, including sexual harassment,” showing how sexual and nonsexual forms of sex-based harassment are “intertwined” (Miller 2008, p. 75).
Yet, most sociological research on harassment focuses on sexual forms of harassment. Survey research privileges sexual advances, focusing on “classic sexual harassment markers, such as un- wanted touching and invasion of personal space” (Uggen & Blackstone 2004, p. 64). Likewise, many qualitative studies select interview respondents who report having experienced “unwanted sexual attention in the work place” (Marshall 2003, p. 671). We need to understand how sexual forms of harassment function as part of a broader range of sex-based discrimination, often inter- secting with other forms of discrimination.
Who Is Targeted?
Supporting MacKinnon’s (1979) theory that harassment jeopardizes women’s economic and ma- terial survival, sociological research shows that harassment leads some women to leave their jobs, creating financial strain and stymieing women’s career advancement (McLaughlin et al. 2012). Sociologists further show that—consistent with MacKinnon’s (1979) theory of harassment as a mechanism of gender subordination—adult women, rather than teenage girls or boys and men, are the most common targets of harassment from male bosses and coworkers (Fitzgerald et al. 1988, Uggen & Blackstone 2004). Similarly, research shows that high school girls are more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment at school (usually from boys), which hurts their aca- demic achievement by, for instance, leading them to have difficulty focusing on schoolwork, doubt their abilities, and earn low grades (Hand & Sanchez 2000; see also Miller 2008).
MacKinnon (1979) focused on instances of women being harassed by male supervisors, who use hierarchical status to sexually coerce women. In cases of contrapower harassment (Rospenda et al. 1998), men with relatively little institutional power harass women supervisors to put them “in their place” (McLaughlin et al. 2012). Black women in positions of authority may even bemore likely to experience contrapower harassment thanWhite women (Buchanan 2005, Rospenda et al. 1998).
A study of street harassment likewise found that women of color are more likely than White women to experience both sexually suggestive and race-related speech from strangers in the street (Nielsen 2000). Black women and other women of color are also at high risk of harassment in domestic work. Since the abolition of slavery, many Black women have worked in the homes of White families,where they have been at high risk of being harassed and lack legal or social recourse (Buchanan & Ormerod 2002, citing Neville & Hamer 2001). A large literature also points to how Latinas are vulnerable to harassment in domestic work (Hondagneau-Sotelo 2007, Romero 2016, Welsh et al. 2006).
The few sociological studies that have examined sexual harassment in housing underscore the extreme vulnerability of poor women of color (Reed et al. 2005, Tester 2008). White male
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landlords commonly act on a sense of entitlement over the tenant, as they would with property (Reed et al. 2005, Tester 2008). Black women’s claims to privacy and personal space are especially tenuous, given the historical context of US slavery, in which White men controlled and violated their bodies.
These studies powerfully demonstrate how gender is a hierarchical system that is insepara- bly intertwined with other axes of oppression, including race (Hamilton et al. 2019). Hegemonic masculinity is valued over both femininity and marginalized masculinities, and can be invoked to undermine other forms of power and hierarchy (Connell 1987). Sexual harassment can be used “as an ‘equalizer’ against women supervisors” (McLaughlin et al. 2012, p. 642). Men with marginal- ized masculinities—such as adolescent men, gay men, men of color, and gender nonconforming men—are also harassed, typically by othermen (Denissen 2010,Pascoe 2005,Uggen&Blackstone 2004). The targeting of women supervisors and gender-nonconforming men serves to police gen- der nonconformity—i.e., stereotypically masculine qualities in women or stereotypically feminine qualities in men (Franke 1997).
Still, gender nonconformity and sexual orientation play out differently for women andmen due to the ways that masculinity and femininity are differently valued, impacting the extent to which different workers are accepted and integrated in the workplace. Because professional competence is stereotypically associated with masculinity, effeminate men and gay men are viewed as less mas- culine and also less competent than their masculine and heterosexual counterparts (Henson & Rogers 2001). In contrast,masculine-presenting women and lesbians may be viewed as more com- petent workers—especially in male-dominated fields—while also being seen as less feminine and, by extension, less likeable (Denissen & Saguy 2014). As such, gender-nonconforming women risk harassment for being socially deviant, while gender-conforming women risk harassment as part of being women. Scholars refer to this as a double bind because women are penalized whether they perform stereotypical masculinity or femininity ( Jamieson 1995, Valian 1998). The double bind means that gender nonconformity may not so much increase women’s likelihood of being harassed as shape the particular reasons for which they are harassed and the form the harassment takes (Denissen & Saguy 2014).
Gender always intersects with race. Yet, lack of racial diversity in survey or interview data limits some researchers’ ability to engage in intersectional analysis that takes into account race, ethnicity, and gender (e.g., Blackstone et al. 2009). The US Merit Systems Protection Board (1981, 1988, 1995),which arbitrates workplace claims filed by federal employees and conducts one of the largest studies of sexual harassment at work, does not separate its data by ethnic group (Berdahl &Moore 2006). Some have suggested that the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (Fitzgerald et al. 1988) and other closed-ended surveys commonly used to measure harassment do not capture the harassment experiences of minority women (Adams 1997, Kalof et al. 2001, Mecca & Rubin 1999).
To demonstrate this point, one study added an open-ended question to the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire, asking Black women students on college campuses if they believed “that there are behaviors or experiences that you, as an African American woman, find sexually harassing that a White woman wouldn’t” (Mecca & Rubin 1999, p. 814). Black women reported comments about their racially based features or stereotypes about the promiscuity of Black women—a type of behavior most closed-ended surveys do not capture (Mecca & Rubin 1999, p. 816). A study of book-length organizational ethnographies likewise found insufficient engagement with race in the sample (Lopez et al. 2009).
Beyond the question of who is targeted by harassers is the question of who is more likely to perceive harassing behavior as harassment. Let us now turn to research examining this question.
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How Social Factors Shape How People Define and Experience Harassment
One take-away from the #MeToo movement is that harassment is ubiquitous; what differs is peo- ple’s ability to protest.1 For instance, some scholarship has argued that women supervisors and women with greater education and job tenure are more likely than women with less workplace authority to be harassed (Berdahl 2007b, Chamberlain et al. 2008, De Coster et al. 1999). But it may just be that women in positions of authority may know more about their legal rights and be more likely to report harassment than workers with less workplace authority (Lopez et al. 2009, Roscigno 2019, Stainback et al. 2011). This speaks to how understandings of harassment vary based on the social location of the target and potentially of the harasser.
More generally, these findings sensitize us to how difficult it is to disentangle rates of harass- ment from understandings of harassment. As awareness and disapproval of harassment increase, people may begin to perceive previously tolerated behavior as intolerable, unjust, and illegal, lead- ing tomore reports of harassment, even as the actual rates of particular types of behavior stay stable or decline. In other words, measuring harassment rates relies on people’s reports (either through the legal process or on surveys), which are, in turn, shaped by changing attitudes about harass- ment. This makes it difficult to compare rates of harassment over time, cross nationally, or across different populations.
For example, gender shapes perceptions of harassment. Some research suggests that women are more likely thanmen to label a range of experiences as harassment,whichmay speak to how people have internalized the notion that harassment is something men do to women (McLaughlin et al. 2012). Indeed, despite the fact that men filed 17% of sexual harassment claims with the EEOC in 2019 (US Equal Employ. Oppor. Comm. 2019), experimental research suggests that most men do not think harassment laws protect them and are more likely than women to perceive sexual harassment laws as threatening their status (Tinkler 2012).
Research shows that commonly held beliefs that men are naturally sexually aggressive may lead women to dismiss harassment as “just the way guys are,” rather than as a problem that should be dealt with through legal or managerial channels (Quinn 2000, p. 1172; see also Tester 2008). Likewise, research suggests that many young girls who have been sexually abused by boys andmen see the abuse as stemming from boys’ and men’s natural and inevitable sexual aggression (Hlavka 2014).
When it comes to men victims of harassment, cultural myths about men being invulnerable to sexual coercion (outside of prisons) may make men loath to discuss their own victimization (Kalof et al. 2001). To identify themselves as victims of harassment would be to deviate from gendered expectations and invite social approbation. Indeed, there is evidence that women are more likely than men to label behavior among men as harassment, especially when the victim is gay (DeSouza & Solberg 2004).
Race also shapes people’s perceptions of harassment. Black women were disproportionately represented among harassment plaintiffs in the earliest Title VII court cases, perhaps because they were more likely than White women to see harassment for what it was (MacKinnon 1979, Siegel 2004). Indeed, women who experience multiple forms of oppression, such as racism and ho- mophobia, may develop a stronger “political consciousness of gender” than women who are not otherwise marginalized (Harnois 2015, p. 365). Consistent with this, a study of Black women fire- fighters found that, in contrast to previous studies showing that White women tended to ignore or minimize harassment or blame themselves (Reilly et al. 1986, Tangri et al. 1982,USMerit Syst.
1Thanks are due to Christine Williams for this point.
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Protect. Board 1988), Black women often confronted the harasser directly or threatened legal ac- tion (Yoder & Aniakudo 1995).Given that Black women firefighters already faced marginalization and exclusion within a White- and male-dominated industry, they reported feeling that they had “nothing to lose” by responding confrontationally (Yoder & Aniakudo 1995, p. 133).
Similarly, among high school students in low-income Black communities, girls assertively de- manded a stop to harassing behavior, a response that may be “grounded in the significant role that standing up for oneself plays in disadvantaged urbanmilieus” (Miller 2008, p. 111). But these resis- tance strategies risked additional harassment and even violence. Specifically, when the girls voiced their concerns, school personnel often showed indifference and even treated them as equally cul- pable as the boys who harassed them (Miller 2008).
Stereotypes of Black women and girls as sexually promiscuous (Buchanan 2005, DeFour 1996, hooks 1981) may also make it less likely that they will be believed when they complain, compared with White women and girls (Miller 2008, Onwuachi-Willig 2018). These dynamics were at play when senators portrayed law professor Anita Hill, a Black woman, as having questionable morals in order to discredit her testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas (Crenshaw 1992). Stereotypes of Black women and girls as promiscuous are one form of what Collins (1990) has called “controlling images” that inform their experiences of harassment (DeFour 1996, Tang et al. 1996). Different controlling images shape the experiences of other women of color: “His- panic women are perceived as hot-blooded, ill-tempered, and deferential to men; Native Ameri- can women as poor, sad, isolated, and devoted to men; and Asian women as small, submissive, and docile” (Kalof et al. 2001, p. 284).
These controlling images can make it more difficult for certain victims to complain and pur- sue relief. For instance, Black women may be reluctant to label experiences as sexual harassment because “in their struggle against the image of sexual promiscuity, Black women may not want to draw attention to themselves as targets of sexual attention” (Kalof et al. 2001, pp. 297–98; see also Russell &Wilson 1996).Moreover, as a study of Black women in policing has shown (Texiera 2002), Black women may hesitate to report harassment from Black men coworkers, out of fear of violating racial solidarity (see also Buchanan 2005, Welsh et al. 2006). Also, women without citi- zenship face particular challenges with confronting or reporting harassment (Welsh et al. 2006).
Legal definitions of harassment have come to “mirror white women’s understandings of sexual harassment” (Welsh et al. 2006, p. 103), not always capturing the experiences of women of color (Buchanan 2005). This may explain why one study finds that Black women report fewer sex-based forms of harassment but more race-based harassment (Ortiz & Roscigno 2009). The fact that Black women are more likely than White women to work in sex-segregated workplaces may also make race more salient than gender for them ( Jaret & Reitzes 1999, Ortiz & Roscigno 2009). An emerging literature (Banneriji 1995, Martin 1994, Texiera 2002) supports the notion that “sexual harassment, when directed toward women of color, often fuses racial and gender domination and may be better defined as racialized sexual harassment” (Buchanan 2005, p. 298).
Given how legal definitions shape what people deem to be actionable, qualitative studies are crucial for distinguishing between the experience of harassment and a willingness to report and label harassment (Williams 1997). For example, a study of the gig or sharing economy found that, while workers were vulnerable to ongoing harassment and assault, they routinely heard that they were not employees with legal protections (Ravenelle 2019). Without legal rights, workers expe- rienced a “loss of political language” (Ravenelle 2019, p. 23). They often labeled their experiences as “weird” or “bizarro-land,” rather than as harassment (Ravenelle 2019, p. 134).
This section has examined how social factors such as gender and race shape the likeli- hood of a person labeling harassing behavior as harassment. But, as sociologists have shown,
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organizational- and national-level factors also shape how people make sense of and respond to harassment. We now turn to this research.
How Organizational- and National-Level Factors Shape Understandings and Experiences of Harassment
A large body of research shows how understandings and experiences of harassment vary based on “organizational norms of heterosexuality and power” in workplaces (Welsh 1999, p. 181). For instance, one study found that the editorial departments of a pornographic men’s magazine and a feminist magazine were both heavily sexualized but in ways that differed based on the content they were producing and on specific workplace power dynamics (Dellinger & Williams 2002). These different social contexts meant that different sorts of behaviors were experienced as harassment in each setting.
An ethnographic study of two restaurants found that workers were less likely to report feeling harassed in organizations with flatter hierarchical structures and where employees shared cultural values and closely coordinated their labor (Lerum2004). In such an organization,workers reported deriving pleasure from consensual sexual banter—without anyone feeling harassed (Lerum 2004). Yet, it is unclear how to create the flatter hierarchical organizations necessary for democracy to flourish (Williams 2006). Along with strict hierarchy, other organizational features—such as intol- erance of dissent, a tendency to dispense rewards and punishments in an arbitrary fashion, a habit of treating workers as dispensable, instilling insecurity in all employees, and tight supervision of employees—maymake harassment more likely while also making it difficult for workers to protest harassing behavior (Williams 2002).
Even among organizations with flat hierarchical structures,more marginalized workers may be unable to participate in a sexualized workplace culture (Giuffre & Williams 1994). For instance, an ethnography of a restaurant found thatWhite women workers tolerated sexual banter and even touching on the part ofWhite men but labeled the same behavior as harassment when perpetrated by men of color (Giuffre &Williams 1994). Likewise, the restaurant ethnography discussed above (Lerum 2004) found that the sole Black man employee at the restaurant was largely excluded from the sexualized banter.
Sociologists looking beyond the United States have found further variation in how people understand harassment. An ethnographic study of a Mexican factory floor found that it was in- tentionally sex segregated and explicitly sexualized (Salzinger 2000). Lacking a legal equivalent to Title VII, however, workers perceived their conditions as legitimate and enthusiastically partici- pated in their own sexualization (but seeMuñoz 2008). In this organizational and national context, sexuality was “central to worker compliance and managerial control” and “an intrinsic aspect of the process of production itself” (Salzinger 2000, p. 82).
Other work has examined how national context shapes legal definitions of sexual harassment. For instance, France has defined sexual harassment differently from the United States—due to the distinct political, legal, and cultural constraints and opportunities that feminists encountered in each country when seeking legal protection against sexual harassment (Saguy 2000, 2003, 2018). Specifically, French feminists could not appeal to civil rights law as did feminists in the United States, so they worked to pass a bill in Parliament. But this required political compromises to garner support for the bill. So while in the United States, workplace harassment came to be de- fined as a civil offense of sex discrimination in which employers are held accountable for mon- etary damages, French law defined harassment as sexual violence, a criminal offense holding the harasser—not the employer—liable (Saguy 2003).
These differing legal understandings of harassment have material consequences not only for the relief victims may receive and the punishment harassers can expect, but also for the remedial
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measures employers take. In the United States, human resource professionals adopted a zealous campaign to protect employers from liability through corporate training programs (Dobbin & Kelly 2007). The courts later recognized these programs as a viable affirmative defense against sexual harassment liability (Dobbin & Kelly 2007). But in France, in the absence of employer liability, employers have done little to address the issue. French lawyers describe a business climate in which sexual harassment policies lack legitimacy and in which victims are often discredited and stigmatized (Saguy 2003). Public policy cannot merely be imported across national boundaries because it is built into the legal and political institutions of particular countries (Saguy 2003, 2018).
Research examining harassment in the Global South further draws our attention to how re- pressive regimes can weaponize harassment policies for their own ends (Amar 2011). In Egypt, the state—along with some feminist nongovernmental organizations—deployed stereotypes of the dangerous masculinities of the Arab street, using discourse on harassment to deflect issues of class conflict and shut down protests (Amar 2011, p. 301). This Islamophobic, racialized, and class-based depiction portrayed peaceful political movements as harassing mobs in order to justify extending police brutality and mass arrests. The state simultaneously sought to undermine the respectability of women protesters who were resisting state oppression by sexually harassing and assaulting them with impunity (Amar 2011, p. 319). This draws our attention to the risk that the state will weaponize harassment and harassment discourses.
In the United States, the legal focus on the workplace (and, secondarily, education) is one reason why we have relatively few sociological studies of harassment outside of the workplace (and education). It also has meant that people have fewer protections from harassment in other social settings. Research on legal consciousness shows how existing laws shape what people think should be legally actionable. For instance, a study drawing on observations and interviews with 100 people in the San Francisco Bay Area found that most women disagreed that there should be a law prohibiting street harassment, despite routinely experiencing such harassment and thinking it was a serious social problem (Nielsen 2000).
ORGANIZATIONAL SOLUTIONS
Employer liability for harassment—combined with human resource departments’ professional incentives—encourages employers to develop sexual harassment policies such as grievance proce- dures and sexual harassment trainings (Dobbin & Sutton 1998, Edelman et al. 1999). By 1998, 19 out of 20 big employers had adopted a sexual harassment policy (Dobbin & Kelly 2007), and most employers had departments and procedures for handling incidents of sexual harassment (Edelman et al. 1999). But are these programs effective? And, if not, are there policies or organizational re- forms that work better?
Executives initially adopted grievance policies and sensitivity training at the suggestion of per- sonnel representatives, not lawyers.Executives liked these programs because theymade companies look like they were taking the issue seriously and because they ran smoothly and had predictable costs, even if there was no evidence that they actually worked (Dobbin & Kelly 2007; see also Hirsh & Kornrich 2008). In fact, evidence on the efficacy of these programs remains mixed. Some studies suggest that sexual harassment policies reduce rates of harassment and contribute to work- place norms that are less tolerant of unwanted sexual attention (Chamberlain et al. 2008, Lopez et al. 2009, Mueller et al. 2001, Tinkler et al. 2015). Some experimental research further suggests that sexual harassment training may lead to more expansive understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment (Tinkler 2008).
Yet, teaching employees about organizational sexual harassment policies may elicit backlash, especially from men who feel most threatened by those policies (Tinkler 2008). Likewise, some
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studies suggest that sexual harassment trainings are not effective (Roscigno 2007) and may rein- force gender stereotypes, such as that women are emotional or duplicitous (Tinkler 2012; Tinkler et al. 2007, 2015). In some cases, filing complaints seems to make matters worse, particularly when the harasser is a supervisor (Hart 2019,Marshall 2005).Women employees may even narrow their own understanding of what is legally actionable after interacting with organizational grievance procedures (Marshall 2005). This literature generally does not investigate the extent to which policies focus on sexual harassment, as opposed to nonsexual sex-based-harassment, and how this might impact their effectiveness.
Harassed employees hesitate to use grievance procedures because they rightly fear retaliation (Berrey et al. 2017, Cortina &Magley 2003), do not think supervisors will believe them (Marshall 2005), and expect to lose esteem from coworkers, believing their careers will suffer as a result (Hart 2019). Indeed, more than two-thirds of sexual harassment claims filed with government agencies include an allegation of employer retaliation, a rate that is highest for Black women (McCann et al. 2018). Given that the vast majority of victims lack access to an expensive legal system and that these cases are rarely successful, with only 2% of complaints of gender discrimination result- ing in legal victories, some have concluded that, “for the vast number of women who experience harassment, there are no legal services” (Hirshman 2019, p. 221). People reporting harassment are much more likely to lose their jobs than those who experience similar harassment without speaking up, and companies see significant declines in Black, Latina, and Asian American women in both management and nonmanagement roles after establishing grievance procedures for ha- rassment (Dobbin & Kalev 2017). A study of a university’s grievance procedures (Marshall 2005) found that managers took the side of the harasser instead of the accuser when the harasser had more institutional authority. Managers also offered restrictive interpretations of written policy to effectively dismiss employee complaints, using the policy to protect institutional interests rather than employee rights (Kihnley 2000).
While training programs,which treat trainees as potential harassers, tend to backfire, bystander training—the if-you-see-something-do-something approach—seems to be effective (Banyard et al. 2007, Cares et al. 2014, Katz & Moore 2013). These programs put the onus of intervening on witnesses. Likewise, training delivered exclusively to managers has been shown to be effective (Dobbin & Kalev 2019). With both bystander training and manager training, men are “assumed to be potential heroes not villains,” an approach that is more likely to get them to buy in (Dobbin & Kalev 2019, p. 48; see also Tinkler et al. 2015). Encouraging bystander reports of harassment makes sense given evidence that they are less likely than self-reports to lead to the stigmatization of harassment victims (Hart 2019).
The ombuds office and voluntary dispute resolutions also show promise for addressing harass- ment (Dobbin & Kalev 2020; Marshall 2005). Ombuds offices sit outside of the organizational chain of command and work independently to resolve harassment complaints. They are neutral and truly confidential. Unlike existing grievance procedures, accusers can determine whether or not to make their complaints known to the accused and can choose to avoid legalistic hearings entirely (Dobbin & Kalev 2020). Some studies suggest decentralizing dispute resolutions through formal open-door policies that allow employees to raise concerns with anyone in management (Dobbin & Kalev 2017). This may involve training employees across all levels of management on what to do when someone reports harassment and emphasizing informal solutions such as “low- key conversations” with harassers on how to change their behaviors (Marshall 2005, p. 118; see also Flynn 1997). Train-the-trainer programs and harassment task forces enlist employees both in learning about and also in addressing harassment in their workplaces. And publishing data about harassment exposes the problem, bringing it to managerial attention (Dobbin & Kalev 2020). Or- ganizations can also use confidential electronic systems to allow employees to report harassment
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but embargo the report until someone else complains about the same person (Dobbin & Kalev 2017).
Voluntary dispute resolutions represent an alternative that “falls somewhere between a formal grievance procedure and an ombuds office” (Dobbin & Kalev 2020, p. 50). While less adversarial than a legalistic grievance procedure, voluntary dispute resolutions still identify victims to the accused and require that both parties are committed to finding a solution. For these to work, participationmust be voluntary so that accusers can decide at any point in the process whether they want to bow out and file a formal grievance (Dobbin &Kalev 2020). Voluntary dispute resolutions differ from mandatory arbitration, which requires that employees sign away their right to sue for any employment-related dispute. The latter require that employees agree to keep disputes confidential, abide by arbitrators’ decisions, and refrain from taking disputes to court. As such, they do not protect employees (Dobbin & Kalev 2020).
In that the gender and racial composition of the workforce affects the likelihood of harassment, addressing harassment may also require efforts to recruit and retain workers who are not White men. Research shows that women experience the most extreme forms of harassment and are ha- rassed most often in male-dominated work environments (De Coster et al. 1999, Gruber 1998, Stainback et al. 2011).Women in occupations with high proportions of women, such as maids, sec- retaries, or waitresses, also experience harassment (Chamberlain et al. 2008). And Black women working in an all-female work group may experience sexualized racist acts from White women (Buchanan & Ormerod 2002). In contrast, workers are less likely to file formal grievances with the EEOC in workplaces that are diverse with respect to sex and race, in terms of both top-level management positions and the organization as a whole (Hirsh & Kornrich 2008).
Together, this research suggests that companies might be able to prevent harassment by taking steps, such as through special college recruitment efforts or mentorship programs, to hire and retain more women of all races and ethnicities (Dobbin & Kalev 2019). Some research (Kalev et al. 2006) suggests that organizational structures that establish responsibility for change, such as affirmative action plans and diversity committees, are most effective for increasing managerial diversity among women of all races and ethnicities and people of color, as opposed to trainings or evaluations that focus on changing individual attitudes (but seeHirsh&Kornrich 2008).One legal scholar (Schultz 2003, p. 2172) has proposed using harassment law to “offer employers the incen- tive to desegregate their workplace” so that women of all races are fully integrated into leadership positions and jobs and men are integrated into traditionally feminized occupations.
Yet such efforts are unlikely to be a panacea. One study of a Fortune 500 company (Berrey 2015, pp. 196–97) found that a push for diversity mostly rewarded those “at the top of the class hierarchy,” omitting nonunionized and lower-level workers. This study found that diversity prac- tices served the brand identity of this corporation as an elaborate public relations campaign and that there were no consequences to hold managers accountable for meeting diversity goals (Berrey 2015).We also know that women face harassment in workplaces with growing numbers of women, perhaps due to backlash (Stainback et al. 2011). Moreover, addressing sex segregation in employ- ment is tricky, and using the law to push companies to do so could have unintended consequences, including placing men in women-dominated professions on a “glass escalator” to the top of the professional hierarchy (Williams 1995, p. 87; see also Williams 2006).
Addressing harassment may also require changing workplace culture.Women are less likely to be harassed in workplaces with cultures that emphasize advancement opportunities for women and have clear evaluation criteria (Hirsh & Kornrich 2008, Stainback et al. 2011). Greater coworker social support likewise seems to reduce reports of harassment (Chamberlain et al. 2008,De Coster et al. 1999, Morgan 1999, Mueller et al. 2001), perhaps because workers are less likely to inter- pret behavior as discriminatory in work environments with supportive cultures (Stainback et al.
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2011). While workplace cultures may be difficult to change, reorganizing work to encourage collaboration—focusing less on hierarchies by jobs and more on cooperative teams—may reduce racial and gender inequalities (Kalev 2009, Tinkler et al. 2015). Changing workplace culture may, in turn, require restructuring organizational hierarchies so that they are less steep and so that su- periors do not have unconstrained authority (Lerum 2004, Schultz 2018, Stainback et al. 2011, Williams 2002).
Other literature points to organizational changes that could be relatively easy to implement given managerial will. For instance, research suggests that employer-sponsored, out-of-office so- cializing with colleagues, customers, and suppliers puts women in sales at risk for harassment and exclusion (Morgan & Martin 2006). A relatively easy fix to this problem would be for employers to decline to sponsor company business at strip clubs or in places, such as many golf clubs, that exclude women (Morgan & Martin 2006). Businesses may even want to reassess the effectiveness and benefit of using out-of-office entertainment altogether. At the time of this writing, in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic, some people are reassessing the benefits more broadly of in-person interactions for office workers. Future research agendas will have to determine the effects of a mediated world of Zoom calls—and prohibitions on physical contact among essential workers—on patterns of discrimination and harassment.
Sociologists should also examine how their own organizations and even sociological training may perpetuate harassment. Somework suggests that the kinds of training programs and grievance policies used by universities are ineffective or even counterproductive (Dobbin & Kalev 2019). In contrast, sociologists can and should hold academia accountable to develop policies and fund programs that are based on scientific evidence of what actually works. Meanwhile, college admin- istrators should address organizational features of universities—including single-sex fraternities and a culture of heavy drinking and hooking up—that make harassment, assault, and rape among college students so common (Hirsch & Khan 2020, Wade 2017).
Within sociology departments, there is evidence that graduate training in ethnography may be putting women students and faculty at risk of harassment in the field while creating barriers to their professional success as scholars (Hanson & Richards 2019). Specifically, a recent study found that ethnographic training glorifies work by solitary researchers forging intimate relation- ships in dangerous environments. As a result, women ethnographers reported feeling pressure to put themselves in situations where they risk harassment and assault in the field. Many women graduate students reported feeling as if they have to relegate their sexualized or gendered expe- riences to an “awkward surplus” rather than analyze it as valid data (Hanson & Richards 2017, p. 602). This promotes a “fiction of a genderless self” that obscures “the fact that the heterosexual male body remains the default in research” (Hanson & Richards 2017, p. 606; citing Orrico 2015). Many women reported being made to feel unprofessional for discussing their experiences with harassment (Hanson & Richards 2017), producing an additional layer of sex-based harassment.
If we want to prevent harassment within sociology, we would do well to better train students for different types of encounters in the field, to disabuse students of notions that valuable research only comes from intimate relationships, and to rethink suspicions of collaborative research—even for doctoral research (Hanson & Richards 2019). Just as men have an important role to play in eradicating harassment from corporate workplaces, so too men ethnographers can be part of the solution by talking “about their experiences with vulnerability and fears in the field so women do not feel like they are coming up short in comparison” (Hanson & Richards 2017, p. 604).
CONCLUSION
A few years have passed since the #MeToo moment went viral, when each day seemed to bring more lurid tales of sexual assault and harassment tied to powerful men. News media routines that
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privilege selling copy or, in the Internet age, getting a maximum number of views (Christin 2018, Schudson 2003) encourage journalists to frame harassment in terms of sexual predation by bad individual men (Saguy 2002). In contrast, sociologists are trained to identify not only the social mechanisms that contribute to harassment but also the social interventions that could effectively root it out.
Our review of the sociological literature on harassment suggests that workplace sex-based ha- rassment is best understood as a strategy that some people use to underminemarginalized workers’ integration into the workplace and ability to perform their jobs. It shows how people’s under- standings of harassment and of what is unlawful vary based on individual-, organizational-, and national-level factors. It demonstrates how gender subordination intersects with racial subordina- tion so that harassment means “different things depending on the races of the perpetrator and the victim” (Franke 1997, p. 744; see also Murrell 1996). Sociological research elucidates why current policies fail to prevent or address harassment and what approaches would be more effective.
We began this review by recounting how MacKinnon argued that the workplace was a spe- cial arena in which the government had a greater obligation to protect women from harassment because it was tied to their economic and material survival. Yet, the literature shows that other spheres—including housing—are similarly tied to women’s material survival and the basic human need for safe shelter. Many poor women, especially poor women of color, report feeling trapped into withstanding sexual harassment as the “price” that they pay “to access or maintain housing for themselves and their children” (Tester 2008, p. 358). Gender inequality shapes all areas of social life, including our own sociology graduate training. Sociologists studying gender, harassment, and power in the #MeToo era must be able to look past legal definitions to address the myriad ways in which harassment impacts the most marginalized members of society.
There is some preliminary evidence that women are more often believed in the #MeToo era than they once were, a topic deserving of further research (Hart 2019, Saguy 2020). Speaking to this,AnitaHill recently stated, “In today’s atmosphere, there would bemore people whowould un- derstand my story, who would believe my story” (Lopez 2017). But despite this potential progress, legal and sociological scholars are still calling for better understanding of the “unique, racialized and gendered harassment experiences that women of color face” (Onwuachi-Willig 2018, p. 119). In the words of Tarana Burke, “This work can’t grow unless it’s intersectional” (Onwuachi-Willig 2018, p. 120; citing Cooney 2017).
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wrote this article during a graduate seminar on the same topic and benefited from weekly dis- cussions with students in the seminar, including Charlotte Abel, Alejandra Cabrel, Sarah Cousins, Deja Goodwin, Irene del Mastro Naccarato, and Ziding Shen.We thank Frank Dobbin, Natasha Quadlin, Ziding Shen, Christine L. Williams, and Juliet A. Williams for generous and insightful comments on this article.
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