Consciousness About Sexual Harassment Among Heterosexual and Lesbian Women Workers

Abstract

This paper explores the nature of sexual harassment as a subjective and multi‐faceted concept, one which challenges the meaning of taken‐for‐granted behaviors embedded in heterosexual interactions and relationships. Drawing on survey samples of 237 lesbian and 144 heterosexual working women, the study discusses the ways in which a woman's sexual identity affects her experiences and interpretation of interactions at work as sexual harassment. Four discrete indicators of consciousness about sexual harassment are employed: experiences and feelings about daily approaches, attitudes about the problem of unwanted sexual approaches at work, and recognition and willingness to utilize the term sexual harassment. The findings show that women have a great many physical and sexual experiences at work most of which they dislike; there is substantial recognition of the problem among working women. However, there is a gap between experiencing and disliking the phenomenon and applying the term sexual harassment in describing it. Further, women vary in the use of the label sexual harassment by the degree of social and economic inequality and powerlessness each experiences at her workplace; as a group, lesbians are more likely than heterosexuals to employ the term. The author suggests that further research concerning sexual harassment move beyond documenting incidents since by themselves they do not establish the basis on which particular situations in the everyday lives of working women come to be labeled sexual harassment.

Lesbians: Identifying, facing, and navigating the double bind of sexual orientation and gender in organizational settings

“…Many human resource managers ignore the issues that gays and lesbians face because they lack education about such issues (Lucas and Kaplan, 1994). The lack of education among managers serves to reinforce existing feelings and systems of oppression, as lesbian employees "expend significant energy managing their sexual orientation on the job, attempting to control whether, when, and to whom their orientation is disclosed" (Schneider, 1982;Woods, quoted in Blandford, 2003, p. 625).…”

Sex, power, and dominance: the evolutionary psychology of sexual harassment

“…Under this view, male harassers (the majority of whom are married) are more willing to honor the marital vows of other men than they are to honor their own. This 'property rights' argument rests uneasily with Schneider's (1982) finding that 'closeted' lesbians}who might have a male partner for all the harasser knows}are subjected to more sexual advances than 'open' lesbians} whose partners are known to be women}a finding that suggests that predicted receptivity is a factor influencing men's overtures.…”

Approaches, assaults, attractions, affairs: Policy implications of the sexualization of the workplace

“…But, all of the evidence indicates that it is not just male employers, but male co-workers as well, who are initiators of sexual advances toward women; this too has been anticipated conceptually by Farley (1978: 33) as "...unsolicited nonreciprocal male behavior that asserts a woman's sex role over her function as a worker." Most women dislike these interactions whatever the status of the initiator (Schneider, 1982); however, tolerant or less negative feelings about harassing behavior are more often expressed by women when harassment emanates from co-workers rather than employers (Schneider, 1982;Silverman, 1976;Safran, 1976).…”