Sexual Harassment Among Congressional Staff: A List Experiment

• In Event: Sexism, Sexual Harassment and their Impacts on Politics and Women's Lives

Abstract

Research on gender and the U.S. Congress is often limited to studying how gender dynamics or identities inform the experiences and work of members themselves. However, the gendering of Congress as an institution affects all actors, including congressional staff. In fact, staffers vastly outnumber members and are key players in the everyday functioning of Congress. Investigating staffers’ experiences on Capitol Hill is important to understanding the ways in which gender informs institutional norms, practices, and outcomes. These experiences, especially those that vary by gender, have implications for staff recruitment and retention and, ultimately, for legislative work and outcomes.

In this paper, we focus on two aspects of congressional staffers’ experiences in the U.S. Congress. First, we report on the first ever list experiment designed to measure the incidence of sexual harassment among congressional staff. The sexual harrassment list experiment was embedded in the 2019 Congressional Capacity Survey (CCS), fielded in Spring and Summer of 2019. The CCS collected information on staffers’ career paths, policy expertise, and institutional knowledge, among other items. The responses are then combined with biographical information from the LegiStorm commercial directory that details each person’s current employing office, employer political party, employer district or state, job title, salary, education, gender, ethnicity, and other details.

The list experiment embedded in the CCS was explicitly designed to measure the incidence of sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. Asking direct questions about traumatic experiences like harassment is extremely sensitive, so the list experiment design elicits responses without compelling victims to reveal their experiences explicitly. In the control condition, staffers were given a list of four non-sexual harassment items that staffers may have experienced in the workplace, such as being unfairly admonished by a supervisor in front of colleagues. In the treatment condition, staffers were given a list five items, the same four non-sexual harassment items plus one item -- "Receiving unwelcome sexual advances or uncomfortable comments of a sexual or gendered nature" -- intended to measure whether staffers had experienced sexual harassment. Responses simply asked for a count of experiences they had, not a revaluation of which experiences. We estimate the rate that staffers’ experience harassment overall, as well as differences between the rates within male and female subsets of staffers.

The second aspect of staffers’ experiences that we evaluate is related to their “sense of belonging” on Capitol Hill. We asked two questions about staffers’ “sense of belonging” in the survey instrument. The first asked their sense of belonging in their immediate employing office, while the second asked about their sense of belonging in the institution of Congress as a whole. These questions allow us to test the hypothesis that women, in contrast to men, exhibit a lower sense of belonging in Congress in general and within their individual offices, but that women in offices of female member of Congress exhibit a greater sense of belonging than those in offices of male legislators.

Taken together, these original experiment and observational data offer crucial insight into gender dynamics at play in Congress, with particular implications for women’s career development in politics.

Authors

• Alexander Charles Furnas, University of Michigan

• Timothy M. LaPira, James Madison University

• Kelly Dittmar, Rutgers University-Camden