The term sexual harassment spread through academic circles in the 1970s and began to gain traction as a legal concept in 1977. That year the feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon put forward the argument that workplace harassment constitutes sex discrimination, which is illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Federal judges had previously rebuffed this idea, but by 1978 three courts had agreed with MacKinnon, and in 1986 the Supreme Court concurred.
The watershed moment for the concept came in 1991, during the Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas, when Anita Hill accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her while she was his assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Hill’s televised testimony rocketed sexual harassment into public awareness and prompted many women to come forward with their own stories. Recognizing the extent of the problem—and growing increasingly worried about their legal and public-relations exposure—many companies decided they had to address it. They moved fast. By 1997, 75% of American companies had developed mandatory training programs for all employees to explain what behaviors the law forbids and how to file a complaint, and 95% had put grievance procedures in place for reporting harassment and requesting hearings. Training and grievance procedures seemed like good news for employees and companies alike, and in 1998 the Supreme Court ruled in two separate cases that companies could protect themselves from hostile-environment harassment suits by instituting both.
For a couple of decades most organizations and executives felt good about this: They were dealing with the problem. But sexual harassment is still with us, as the #MeToo movement has made clear. Today some 40% of women (and 16% of men) say they’ve been sexually harassed at work—a number that, remarkably, has not changed since the 1980s. In part that could be because women are now more likely to use the term “harasser” than “cad” for a problem boss. But given how widespread grievance procedures and forbidden-behavior training have become, why are the numbers still so high?
That’s an important question, and we recently decided to try to answer it. We did so by taking a serious look at what happened at more than 800 U.S. companies, with more than 8 million employees, between the early 1970s and the early 2000s. Did the programs and procedures that these companies introduced make their work environments more hospitable to women? We focused in particular on how those initiatives affected the number of women in the managerial ranks. We tested two hypotheses: First, if the programs and procedures are working, they should reduce the number of current and aspiring female managers who leave their jobs because of sexual harassment—and thus we should find more women in management over time. Second, if the programs and procedures are backfiring, current and aspiring female managers should be leaving their jobs in even greater numbers, and the overall number of women in management should be declining.
Our study revealed some uncomfortable truths. Neither the training programs that most companies put all workers through nor the grievance procedures that they have implemented are helping to solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. In fact, both tend to increase worker disaffection and turnover. To us the takeaway seems clear: The programs and procedures that the Supreme Court favored in 1998 amount to little more than managerial snake oil. They are doing more harm than good.
We have to do better. The good news is that our study revealed ways in which we can.
The Trouble with Harassment Training
Does harassment training that focuses on forbidden behaviors reduce harassment? Apparently not. When companies institute this kind of training, our study revealed, women in management lose ground. To isolate the effects of these programs, we used advanced statistical techniques to account for other changes in a firm, its industry, and its state that might be affecting the numbers of women in management. We found that when companies create forbidden-behavior training programs, the representation of white women in management drops by more than 5% over the following few years. African American, Latina, and Asian American women don’t tend to lose ground after such harassment training is instituted—but they don’t gain it either. White women make up three-quarters of all women in management and half of all women in the workforce, so as a group they bear most of the training backlash.
Research shows that harassment training makes men more likely to blame the victims.
Why would training designed to educate employees about harassment create a backlash? That seems counterintuitive. The problem is with how the training is presented. Typically it’s mandatory, which sends the message that men have to be forced to pay attention to the issue. And it focuses on forbidden behaviors, the nitty-gritty, which signals that men don’t know where the line is. The message is that men need fixing.
Start any training by telling a group of people that they’re the problem, and they’ll get defensive. Once that happens, they’re much less likely to want to be a part of the solution; instead they’ll resist. That’s what happens with harassment training: Research shows that it actually makes men more likely to blame the victims and to think that women who report harassment are making it up or overreacting. No surprise, then, that in a 2018 study carried out by the Pew Research Center, more than 30% of men said that false claims of sexual harassment are “a major problem.” And no surprise that 58% of women who had been harassed said that not being believed is a major problem.
This dynamic plays out in predictable ways—one of which is that men, put on the defensive, make jokes about the training scenarios and about harassment itself. The phenomenon is so common that the writers of The Office devoted an entire episode to it. At one point Pam, the receptionist, wearily tells the camera, “Usually, the day we talk about sexual harassment is the day everyone harasses me as a joke.”
What about men who are prone to harass? The reason we make training mandatory is to reach those men. Does training help them, at least? No. Research shows that men who are inclined to harass women before training actually become more accepting of such behavior after training.
Even so, what do companies usually do when they find men culpable in a grievance process? Sentence them to more training. Six states, including California and New York, now require all employers to provide harassment training to all workers.
Commentaires