Sexual Harassment and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market

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

Abstract

This paper starts with a description of the prevalence of sexual harassment in nationally representative data for Sweden. We find that harassment increases for both men and women with the share of opposite-sex people in the occupations or workplaces. By employing vignettes in a discrete choice experiment, we estimate distastes for taking a job in a workplace where sexual harassment has taken place. Both men and women have a large distaste for workplaces with harassment against a person of their own sex, but they have a small distaste when the victim is of the opposite sex. We argue that small distastes among bystanders will drive down demand for economic compensation for harassment risks. A lack of economic compensation is also supported by the observational data, where wages are not systematically higher for people who self-report harassment, or for workplaces where the harassment risk is high. The final part of the paper argues that sexual harassment should be thought of as gender discrimination in amenities. In most workplaces, harassment gives a less favorable work environment for one sex, but without pay compensation. This is consistent with lower job satisfaction, more intentions to quit their jobs, and more actual job separations among harassment victims. We conclude that sexual harassment grows out of the sex-segregation of the labor market, but also reinforces that segregation by lowering the returns from entering into sex-imbalanced occupations and firms

Authors

• Johanna Rickne, Stockholm University

• Olle Folke, Uppsala University