The hidden costs of sexual harassment
Keywords: Sociology.

The MeToo movement has brought heightened attention to the costs of sexual harassment, as countless people have recently spoken out about depression and anxiety or careers cut short following experiences of sexual harassment. Indeed, scholars have shown that being targeted for sexual harassment often negatively impacts mental health and career trajectories. While this research is important, it has generally treated sexual harassment as a discrete event and therefore, I argue, may underestimate the true consequences of sexual harassment. That is, efforts to measure the consequences of sexual harassment have focused from the point that sexually harassing behaviors began onward. As I describe in the first chapter, I depart from this approach in my dissertation research by examining the effects of sexual harassment from a broader temporal range. In the second chapter, I examine the labor involved in anticipating sexual harassment before it occurs. Sexual interactions often involve implicit, ambiguous behavior, yet research on unwanted sexual interactions in the workplace has largely focused on interactions that are explicitly sexual. Drawing on 84 interviews with tech industry workers, I show that unwanted, ambiguously sexual interactions are relatively commonplace in their workplaces. Ambiguously sexual interactions can take multiple interactional trajectories, but one possibility is that they will lead toward explicit sexual harassment. When interviewees worry that an ambiguously sexual interaction might veer into sexual harassment, they engage in what I term trajectory guarding, in which they carefully monitor and guide interactions in an attempt to avoid opportunities for harassment to crop up. Interviewees described trajectory guarding as labor-intensive and potentially detrimental to their careers. Because women tended to be most wary of sexual harassment, they disproportionately engaged in trajectory guarding and risked the possible costs of doing so. I focus on the case of trajectory guarding against ambiguously sexual interactions, but I suggest that trajectory guarding is a more general strategy used by marginalized people seeking to avoid potential mistreatment. In the third chapter, I examine whether MeToo movement-driven shifts in public opinion toward people who experience sexual harassment apply to every person who experiences sexual harassment or only some. In this study, I transpose the concept of the "perfect victim" of rape to the domain of sexual harassment, and I hypothesize that eight features of the "perfect target" will cause them to be viewed as more credible. I find evidence that six of the eight hypothesized features of the perfect target significantly shape the target's perceived credibility. I show that, net of other factors, a Black woman is deemed less credible than a white woman when she shares an account of sexual harassment. Additionally, I show that a woman is deemed less credible when she does not assertively confront the harassment in the moment and when she does not report it to her organization. Finally, I find that a woman is deemed less credible when there were no witnesses to the harassment and when her alleged harasser has not been publicly accused of harassment by others. These results indicate that the greater sympathy toward targets of sexual harassment in the wake of the MeToo movement does not extend equally to every person who experiences sexual harassment. In the fourth chapter, I consider how making the topics of sexual harassment and gender inequality salient may inadvertently entrench them if efforts are not made to counter the negative stereotypes that these topics evoke. In this chapter I identify a mechanism that blunts the effectiveness of initiatives designed to address women's underrepresentation and marginalization in the tech industry: the inscription of gendered stereotypes into narratives about why such initiatives are necessary. Specifically, I show that efforts to address women's underrepresentation sometimes 1) portray women as fundamentally different from, and deficient relative to, men, and 2) frame women as disempowered victims lacking agency. This reinforcement of gendered stereotypes may help to explain why many efforts to address women's underrepresentation in men-dominated workplaces like tech have not produced results. I then show that although women and nonbinary people both report that their colleagues interpret efforts to challenge the gender status quo through the lens of traditional cultural beliefs that reify gendered narratives, for nonbinary people, the operative cultural belief is that gender is binary. This distinction points to the importance of recognizing the multiple pathways through which cultural beliefs about gender shape and reinforce gender inequalities in the workplace. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I return to the gaps in knowledge about sexual harassment raised in the introduction. In doing so, I consider what this research adds to scholarship on sexual harassment