Sexual Harassment in the Workplace: Short- and Long-Term Mental Health Consequences for Older Women

• In Event: 4266 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 5. Employment and Careers

Abstract

The #MeToo movement unfurled in 2017, as millions of women worldwide shared their experiences of workplace sexual harassment. Research documents harmful mental and physical health consequences of harassment, yet survey-based studies focus exclusively on women’s self-reports of whether or not they experienced harassment, ignoring or deleting cases who refuse to report their experiences. Older women who entered the labor market in an era before sexual harassment was sanctioned may be particularly vulnerable to concealing their experiences, due to fear of retribution, shame, or stigma. Using data from midlife and older women who participated in the 1994 and 2004 waves of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) sibling sample (N=1,209), I explore short-term (1994) and long-term (2004) consequences of sexual harassment for three mental health outcomes: depression, anger, and anxiety. The focal predictor is whether a woman did, did not, or refused to report sexual harassment in her current/most recent job in 1994. Just 4 percent reported harassment and 2.6 refused to answer the question. Women who refused to report harassment had elevated depressive symptoms in the short-term relative to women who did not experience harassment, although no differences were detected at the ten-year follow-up. Harassment was unrelated to anxiety symptoms in 1994, although women who refused to report their experiences were more anxious ten years later, net of all covariates. Anger symptoms in 1994 were elevated among women refusing to report harassment and these effects persisted ten years later, yet were no longer statistically significant after adjusting for occupational characteristics. Concealing or refusing to publicly acknowledge harassment has short- and long-term adverse mental health consequences for older women, although these effects partially reflect the fact that self-silencing was most common among women in the disadvantaged occupational group of blue-collar worker. Implications for workplace and mental health policy and practice are highlighted.

Author

• Deborah Carr, Boston University