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Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2025 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PST)

Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Union Square 22
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Nisha Chikhale, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The Scarring Effects of Workplace Sexual Harassment

Nisha Chikhale
,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Natalie Duncombe
,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Birthe Larsen
,
Copenhagen Business School

Abstract

We document new facts about the sources and consequences of sexual harassment in
the workplace using administrative and survey data from Denmark. We estimate that
following workplace sexual harassment, victims, both men and women, see earnings
losses of around 5 percent. Losses are largely driven by workers who transition to new
 rms following harassment suggesting that the consequences of harassment persist even
when workers leave the job where the harassment occurred.

Monitoring Harassment in Organizations

Laura Boudreau
,
Columbia University
Sylvain Chassang
,
Princeton University
Ada Gonzalez-Torres
,
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Rachel Heath
,
University of Washington

Abstract

We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? How isolated are its victims? To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manufacturer to experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. Garbling responses to sensitive questions by automatically recording a random subset as complaints increases reporting of physical harassment by 288%, sexual harassment by 269%, and threatening behavior by 46%. A rapport-building treatment has an insignificant aggregate effect, but may affect men and women differently. Removing team identifiers from survey responses does not significantly increase reporting and prevents the computation of policy-relevant team-level statistics. The resulting data shows that harassment is widespread, that the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and that victims are often isolated in teams.

The Unintended Impacts of Legislating to Handle Workplace Sexual Harassment

Sonia Bhalotra
,
University of Warwick
Medha Chatterjee
,
Ashoka University
Kanika Mahajan
,
Ashoka University
Daksh Walia
,
University of Oxford

Abstract

India is one of a handful of countries that has mandated firms to set up an internal complaints committee to encourage reporting and redressal of sexual harassment against women. We examine the impacts of this legislation, the 2013 Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act (POSH), on the employment of women relative to men leveraging a discontinuity in the scope of the mandate, which requires firms with ten or more workers to comply with its provisions. The analysis proceeds in two steps. First, using data on registered manufacturing enterprises, we find that the share of women in regulated firms falls by close to 5% and that this is driven by regulated relative to unregulated firms hiring men at a faster rate than they hire women relative to before the policy change. We perform a series of robustness checks to confirm the results including using donut DID and doing placebo checks. We also use a nationally representative labour force survey and estimate a 12% decline in the probability that women relative to men are in wage work in regulated vs unregulated enterprises after the Act. Overall, while the work environment may have improved for some women following POSH, our results show an increase in the chances that employed women are in smaller (unregulated) firms where both wages and amenities are lower. Thus, POSH acted to intensify workplace gender segregation. Secondly, we propose a model of firm decision making which incorporates harassment related productivity loss into the firm's problem and presents a potentially novel explanation for the high level of gender segregation in Indian firms. The model also demonstrates how higher gender segregation increases the harassment risk faced by women.

Discussant(s)
Alexandre Mas
,
University of California-Berkeley
Donna Ginther
,
University of Kansas
Nina Buchmann
,
Yale University
JEL Classifications
  • J0 - General
  • O4 - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity