A leadership position does not protect women from sexual harassment – the opposite is the case. According to one, bosses find out recently published study More uncomfortable, sexually connoted situations than other female employees. For the study, scientists evaluated the statements of a total of 26,828 women.
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“A female manager is exposed to a new group of potential perpetrators. She can be harassed by both her employees and senior managers,” said co-author Johanna Rickne, who works as an economics professor at the Swedish Institute for Social Research.
For the study, the scientists evaluated data from the United States, Japan and Sweden. A similar picture emerged in all three countries: Female managers reported between 30 and 100 percent more often that they were being harassed.
“Actually, our expectation was that women with less power at work would experience more harassment”
The different numbers result from the type of survey: In some parts of the study, women had to subjectively assess whether they had ever been sexually harassed at work. Others asked which specific situations the study participants had experienced – whether they treated someone worse after they turned down an offer for sex, or whether they had repeatedly invited them to the restaurant, even though they kept saying “no”.
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When the women only had to answer whether they had ever experienced sexual harassment, the rate in Japan and the United States was 100 percent higher than that of other female employees. This value was not recorded in Sweden. “Actually, we expected women with less power to experience more harassment at work. In fact, we found the opposite,” said Rickne.
If the women had a “mainly male” team, they were particularly affected. In all of the countries examined, they experienced on average 30 percent more sexual harassment than female bosses who had “mainly female” employees.
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Every eleventh German employee has experienced sexual harassment
The situation in Germany was not examined in the study, but current research shows that every 11th German employee has experienced inappropriate jokes or touches in the past three years. Women were affected more than twice as often as men as one Study by the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency shows.
Last year Der SPIEGEL asked its readers: “What have you experienced?” And received on it many letters from womenwho have been harassed at work before. One reader wrote: “I didn’t say anything about it. But the shame was great because I just endured it.”
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