Sexual harassment primarily refers to harassment involving unwanted sexual behavior, though it may occasionally refer to harassment with a sexist targeting pattern. Although some types of sexual harassment seem to be motivated by sexual desire, they are more often committed to hurt women or punish people for violating gender norms. Popular understanding of sexual harassment primarily focuses on sexual coercion and unwanted sexual advances, which are less common than other types of harassment. All types of sexual harassment can harm a victim's physical and mental health and affect their personal and professional lives.
Sexual harassment may involve harassers or victims of any gender, occur between friends or strangers, involve equal or subordinate relationships, and consist of verbal, physical, or indirect actions. Examples may involve insulting sexual or sexist remarks, offensive sexual innuendo, indecent exposure, sexting, sexual roleplay, collecting or disseminating photos of the victim in private moments, demanding or requesting sexual favors as bribery, and sexual assault like groping or rape.Dziech, Billie Wright; Weiner, Linda. The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus. Chicago Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1990. ; Boland, 2002
In most countries, certain types of workplace sexual harassment are illegal as a form of employment discrimination. The legal and social understanding of sexual harassment varies by culture. Employment laws do not impose a "general civility code", so they generally do not prohibit minor isolated harassment incidents. In many countries, harassment may be considered illegal when it is frequent or severe enough to create a hostile or offensive work environment, or when it results in an adverse employment decision (such as the victim's demotion, firing, or quitting). Over 100 countries have laws against both hostile environment and quid pro quo types of sexual harassment, and dozens have laws specifically addressing sexual harassment based on sexual orientation or gender identity. For many businesses or organizations, preventing sexual harassment and defending employees from sexual harassment charges have become key goals of legal decision-making.
Etymology and history The term "sexual harassment" was coined in the 1970s, and its meaning and popularity as a concept have grown over time. However, the behaviors it describes are common across cultures and eras, and have also been described by other terms. Although discussion of sexual harassment has frequently been silenced and trivialized over time, reports of workplace sexual harassment have been documented since at least the 1600s.
The framing of sexual harassment as a legal issue also originated in the 1970s. Since the 1990s, many countries have adopted laws targeting sexual harassment, and social movements like #MeToo have raised awareness of the concept and spurred social and legal change.
The term "sexual harassment"
These activists, Lin Farley, Susan Meyer, and Karen Sauvigne, went on to form Working Women United, which, along with the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion (founded in 1976 by Freada Klein, Lynn Wehrli, and Elizabeth Cohn-Stuntz), was among the pioneer organizations to bring sexual harassment to public attention in the late 1970s. Farley also wrote a book to raise awareness, Sexual Shakedown: The Sexual Harassment of Women on the Job, first published by McGraw-Hill in 1978. Sexual Shakedown inspired the first workplace training video on sexual harassment.
Legal view The legal understanding of sexual harassment developed through lawsuits women brought forward in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. The development of U.S. laws on sexual harassment in workplaces shaped similar developments in other countries. Many of the women pursuing the earliest U.S. cases were African American, often former civil rights activists, who applied principles of civil rights to sex discrimination. Early precedent was set with Williams v. Saxbe (1976) and Paulette L. Barnes, Appellant, v. Douglas M. Costle, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (1977) which determined it was sex discrimination to fire someone for refusing a supervisor's advances.
In 1979, American legal scholar and activist Catharine MacKinnon published a seminal book called Sexual Harassment of Working Women. She popularized the argument that some workplace sexual harassment was consistent with sex discrimination and therefore prohibited behavior under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. MacKinnon also developed the legal classification of sexual harassment types, as quid pro quo or hostile environment harassment. MacKinnon's arguments were key to developing international legal understandings of sexual harassment.
In the U.S., sexual harassment case law continued soon after with Bundy v. Jackson (1981), the first federal appeals court case to hold that workplace sexual harassment was employment discrimination. Five years later the Supreme Court agreed with this holding in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. Another pioneering legal case was Alexander v. Yale (1980), which established that the sexual harassment of female students could be considered sex discrimination under Title IX, and was thus illegal. The first class-action lawsuit, Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co., was filed in 1988 (concluding nine years later).
Similar precedents were set throughout the 1980s in the UK based on the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act. Throughout the late 1980s, other countries began to establish laws against sexual harassment, and by 1994, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden had established laws targeting sexual harassment. By 2021, 142 countries had laws against sexual harassment in the workplace, with 103 countries prohibiting both quid pro quo and hostile environment harassment. 39 countries had laws explicitly prohibiting sexual harassment based on sexual orientation, and 24 countries explicitly addressed harassment based on gender identity.
Beyond sexual advances Definitions of sexual harassment have changed over time, and common legal definitions now differ in some ways from those used by psychologists and other researchers. All tend to incorporate an element of unwelcome behavior, but researchers often define sexual harassment by the behavior that occurred, while legal definitions focus on whether certain requirements are met.
Over the 1980s and 1990s, psychologists defined gender harassment as a key subtype of sexual harassment. Gender harassment is a class of verbal or nonverbal behaviors that insult or provoke based on gender: examples include sexual comments or jokes, sexualized imagery, and comments based on gendered stereotypes. Notably, all of these examples were provided in Rowe's original 1973 Saturn's Rings report on sexual harassment and discrimination. There are many motivations for gender harassment, but two important ones are sexist beliefs and gender policing. Both factors cause gender harassment to reinforce existing gender roles, causing legal scholar Katherine Franke to label gender harassment as "a technology of sexism".
Gender harassment has nothing to do with sexual attraction and is not a type of sexual advance. This can make it confusing that it is a type of sexual harassment, because the word "sexual" seems to imply underlying sexual desire. Initial legal and social theories of sexual harassment often viewed it as motivated by sexual desire. However, explanations of the underlying cause later changed to a male desire to dominate or a desire for anyone to maintain their sex-based social status. These theories reframe sexual harassment as harassment based on sex or gender, rather than something inherently sexual. Various legal and sociological definitions of sexual harassment include non-sexual, sexist behavior, but the emphasis on the word "sexual" means the definitions often cause confusion and debate. Some laws explicitly cover unwanted sexual and sex-based behavior under their definition of "sexual harassment," while others define sex-based harassment and sexual harassment as two different types of harassment. Some researchers have advocated for the term "sexual harassment" to be replaced with "sex-based harassment" to emphasize the fact that these types of harassment center on gender, not the presence of sexual desire in harassment.
In the late 1990s, some legal scholars began to advocate for more explicitly including gender harassment in sexual harassment law, but this was a minority view. Existing sexual harassment law frequently does cover some instances of gender harassment, but it is often viewed as less severe than other types of sexual harassment in a legal context. However, psychologists continue to emphasize the study of gender harassment because it is by far the most common type of harassment and has major negative consequences both for the individuals faced with it and the groups who are exposed to repeated gender harassment.
Aspects
There is no universal definition of sexual harassment: understandings of it vary across legal, scientific, and cultural settings. Social scientists define sexual harassment by the type of behavior involved and its effect on victims. By these definitions, sexual harassment includes hostile sexist acts (gender harassment), unwanted sexual attention, and sexual coercion. Legal definitions of workplace sexual harassment tend to classify it into quid pro quo demands for sexual favors in exchange for job impacts, or offensive conduct that creates a hostile environment. Laws differ on whether both are considered illegal sexual harassment and whether sexual harassment includes only sexually-related harassment or also harassment based on gender.
Sexual harassment also includes other types, examples can be making sexual comments or jokes, touching someone without their consent, indecent exposure and sending unwanted messages. Actions like this can make people feel uncomfortable or even disrespected. Because of things like this, a lot of workplaces have created policies to prevent sexual harassment and also to help people report it.
Labeling as sexual harassment One of the difficulties in understanding sexual harassment is that it involves a range of behaviors. In most cases (although not in all cases), it is difficult for the victim to describe what they experienced. This can be related to difficulty classifying the situation, or to stress and humiliation experienced by the recipient. Moreover, behavior and motives vary between individual cases.
Many instances of sexual harassment are not actually labeled that way by the involved parties. For female victims of experiences that match social science definitions of sexual harassment, victims only self-label the experience as sexual harassment 25% of the time. The rate is even lower for male victims. However, whether victims label an incident as sexual harassment or not, they report the same levels of distress and negative impact. This labeling issue was first discovered after other researchers found that victims of rape are similarly unlikely to label their experience as rape.