Workplace Sexual Harassment and the Legal Environment

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 22. Job Training and Programs

Abstract

This study investigates how federal and state-level laws ostensibly designed to reduce workplace sexual harassment, employers’ expressed motivations for handling sexual harassment and their actual experience with formal sexual harassment charge filings* together relate the presence of workplace sexual harassment training programs. We draw on unique data from roughly 85 U.S. work establishments, their EEO-1 reports, and data from a state employment law database and to answer our research questions. Federal oversight, indicated by an establishment’s location in a liberal appellate court circuit, is positively associated with the scope of establishment’s sexual harassment training programs. State laws regulating workplace sexual harassment are positively associated with the procedural reinforcement and extent of follow-up of establishments’ sexual harassment programs. Profit motivations for the adoption of sexual harassment training programs are strong indicators of sexual harassment policy content; they are positively and strongly related to the scope, reinforcement, and follow-up of training programs. We discuss the research and policy implications of the relevance of external and internal regulation of sexual harassment at work. *discrimination filing data will not be compiled and added to our data set until spring/early summer 2014. We have submitted a complete paper without these analyses.

Authors

• Julie A. Kmec, Washington State University

• Elizabeth Hirsh, University of British Columbia

• Sheryl L. Skaggs, University of Texas-Dallas