Speak Up, Speak Out (HBR Women at Work Series) by Harvard Business Review

Author:Harvard Business Review
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

10

Ending Harassment at Work Requires an Intersectional Approach

by Pooja Jain-Link, Trudy Bourgeois, and Julia Taylor Kennedy

If your company approaches the problem of sexual misconduct with one-size-fits-all solutions, chances are high you aren’t protecting some of the most vulnerable members of your workforce. The experiences of women of color—and of men of color—are at risk of being misunderstood and undervalued.

In the Center for Talent Innovation’s study “What #MeToo Means for Corporate America,” we uncovered a nuanced, at times surprising, portrait of sexual misconduct.1 Our research illustrates the varied landscapes professionals of different backgrounds face when it comes to sexual misconduct. It reveals the ways race and gender intersect to complicate our standard narrative of motive, and our standard image of a senior male perpetrator and junior female victim.2

After all, sexual harassment is not simply about sex. It is often a tool wielded to assert power and dominance. As Teresa Fitzsimmons, director of workplace dynamics at Lausanne Business Solutions, notes, “Sexual harassment is a signal of an individual having a lack of respect for another … [it] evolves out of disrespect and asymmetric power.”3 That asymmetric power can refer to men harassing women, but as we discovered in our research, race and seniority can complicate the picture.

Overall, we found that 34% of female employees have been sexually harassed by a colleague. When we broke down that number by race and job level, a more complex story began to emerge.

Among the Asian women we surveyed who had been harassed, nearly one in three (31%) say that the perpetrator was a junior colleague. This finding contradicts the common assumption that harassment only comes from above. The fact that so many women in this group report bottom-up harassment may stem from stereotypes that Asian women are deferential, easy targets for younger colleagues looking to assert power.4 “There is the fetishization of Asian women that I see with a lot of white men,” Mila, a Vietnamese American business development executive told us. “They expect us to be docile, easy, and exotic. But I hadn’t expected that to carry over at work.”

Similarly, nearly one in four Black women who have been sexually harassed say that the perpetrator was a more junior colleague (22%) or that the perpetrator was another woman (23%).

This same dynamic plays out vividly in our exploration of male victims of sexual misconduct. Men, we find, experience a deeper shame because of gender expectations. Misconduct compromises their masculinity, making it difficult to talk about incidents of harassment or assault.

Black men are far more likely to have been sexually harassed by a colleague than men of other backgrounds. More than one in five Black men have been sexually harassed by a colleague, compared to 13% of white men. And 85% of Black male victims have been harassed by a woman. Colleagues may be using harassment as a weapon to assert racial dominance; and the disproportionate harassment of Black men could stem from the historical fetishization of the Black male body, and Black men’s dual legacy of being both feared and desired.

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