Sexual Harassment in Organizations: A Decade of Research in Review

Abstract

For 30 years, sexual harassment has been recognized as a serious organizational prob-lem and a violation of US law. The Navy Tailhook scandal and Clarence Thomas hear-ings in l99l launched sexual harassment to the forefront of public attention. This was followed by a virtual explosion ofresearch on the topic, leading to the estimate that one out of every two women is harassed at some point in her working life. We review this scholarship in the current chapter, concentrating on the last decade ol work. Our principal locus is sexual harassment in the workplace. Although sexual harassment also occurs elsewhere, other domains are beyond the scope of this chapter. This chapter also primarily covers research since the mid-1990s (except for brief historical overviews). Sexual harassment scholarship began in the late I 970s, and several large-scale surveys in the 1980s (Gutek, 1985;USMSPB, 1981, 1988; Martindale, 1990) influenced work that followed. Since then, however, the workforce has become more educated about sexual harassment, organizational methods of combating sexual harassment have evolved, and sexual-harassment research methodolo-gies have become increasingly advanced. We therefore concentrate on the most recent, methodologically sophisticated work. Finally, resea¡ch on this topic largely addresses men's harassment of women, so this will be the main focus of our review. We organize this chapter around the fol-lowing questions: What is sexual harassment? Why does it happen? Who harasses whom? What are its effects? Finally, how do and how should individuals and organizations respond to sexual harassment? Each of these sections provides a brief historical recap of early work on the topic, followed by a detailed review of recent scholarship. Throughout, we address ¡elevant issues in US law but maintain a focus on theory and finclings tiom social science (particularly psychology). The chapter will close with a discussion of the future of sexual harassment scholarship.