{"id":6245,"date":"2017-04-24T11:01:59","date_gmt":"2017-04-24T16:01:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/?p=6245"},"modified":"2017-04-24T11:01:59","modified_gmt":"2017-04-24T16:01:59","slug":"the-organizational-barriers-to-reporting-sexual-harassment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2017\/04\/24\/the-organizational-barriers-to-reporting-sexual-harassment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Organizational Barriers to Reporting Sexual Harassment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo by Christian Schnettelker, Flickr CC<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The recent media attention surrounding Fox News and accusations of sexual harassment are high-profile examples of the everyday experiences that many victims of sexual harassment face in the workplace. An article<\/a> in the\u00a0<\/span>New York Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>explores research on the factors that discourage people from reporting harassment, citing work from University of Illinois sociologist <\/span>Anna-Maria Marshall<\/span><\/a> and others. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sexual harassment often goes under-reported, especially in male-dominated settings with rigid hierarchies like the military and large corporate companies. Sometimes victims are uncertain of what qualifies as illegal harassment — one <\/span>meta-analysis<\/span><\/a> by <\/span>Remus Ilies<\/span><\/a> and colleagues found that reports doubled when asked about specific behaviors rather than just using the term \u201csexual harassment.\u201d Many women also fear retaliation for pursuing formal action, or at the very least disbelief or inaction from their employers. These fears appear to be well placed, however, and\u00a0<\/span>one study<\/span><\/a>\u00a0found that two-thirds of workers reported retaliation from their employers after reporting mistreatment. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

While many startup companies do not have human resource departments to handle sexual harassment issues, Marshall\u2019s research demonstrates that even organizations with official harassment policies and procedures create hurdles that keep\u00a0legal action from being taken. Marshall finds that policies on paper are much different in practice, and that managers often interpret policies to protect the interests of their organization, and not the employee. Marshall\u00a0explains,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCompanies put [policies and procedures] into place as mini litigation defense centers\u00a0… The way employers deal with it is to prepare to show a court or jury that they did everything they could, rather than to protect women in the workplace.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent media attention surrounding Fox News and accusations of sexual harassment are high-profile examples of the everyday experiences that many victims of sexual harassment face in the workplace. An article in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0explores research on the factors that discourage people from reporting harassment, citing work from University of Illinois sociologist Anna-Maria Marshall and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1957,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,13,85],"tags":[39112,2751,39114,39110,10413,1008],"class_list":["post-6245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-inequality","category-politics","tag-culture","tag-fox-news","tag-gender","tag-inequality","tag-sexual-harassment","tag-workplace"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6245"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6250,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions\/6250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}