Sexual Harassment at Work: Scoping Review of Reviews

Background

This article presents a scoping review of reviews on the topic of Sexual Harassment (SH) in the workplace, a subject that has garnered significant global attention. The phenomenon of SH poses a critical challenge to equal opportunity and gender equity in the workplace.

Aim

The review aims to synthesize existing research, focusing on the antecedents, consequences, and interventions related to SH.

Methods

The inclusion and exclusion criteria were established based on the research question, which was adapted from the PICO strategy. A protocol was devised following the "DS-CPC" format, which encompasses considerations related to Documents, Studies, Construct, Participants, and Contexts. The search was carried utilizing several automated databases, specifically focusing on the fields of Psychology, Behavioral Sciences, and Health. Preliminary search yielded a total of 468 articles, and the review ultimately encompassed a total of 22 articles.

Results

This review critically examines the complexity of SH, including the role of bystanders, the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions, and the exploitation of power imbalances by harassers. It also explores the manifestation of SH in male-dominated workplaces and the varying levels of organizational awareness and response to such incidents. The review highlights the importance of fostering an organizational culture that not only acknowledges and protects victims but also implements effective measures to penalize perpetrators.

Implications

It aims to elucidate the intricacies of SH and advocate for a workplace environment characterized by respect and accountability. Through this comprehensive analysis, the article seeks to inform and guide future research, policy development, and organizational practices concerning SH.

Closing the scissor-shaped curve: Strategies to promote gender equality in academia

Gender inequality in STEM fields remains pervasive and undermines the ability for talented individuals to excel. Despite advances, women still encounter obstacles in pursuing academic careers and reaching leadership positions. This commentary discusses the "scissor-shaped curve" and examines effective strategies to fix it, including data-driven initiatives that we have implemented at our university.

The power of (surreptitiously) mentioning your mentor's name: Subliminal priming of mentor's name modulates N170 responses to blurred faces

Using the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique and subliminal priming paradigm, the present study examined the influence of mentioning a mentor's name on graduate students. Fifty-eight graduate students were subliminally primed by mentor and stranger names before making pressure judgments of a series of unrelated blurred facial photos with neutral emotion. The face-sensitive N170 components were analyzed according to the pressure judgment × name prime conditions. The results showed that relative to stranger names, subliminal priming of mentor's name could modulate students' N170 reactions during facial processing. Specifically, the mentor-name priming attenuated N170 amplitudes for high-pressure judgment trials on the right hemisphere but heightened the overall N170 responses on the left hemisphere. Behavioral results also showed that the mentor-name priming slowed students' reaction time during pressure judgments; in addition, students' attitudes towards mentors were correlated with N170 amplitudes on high-pressure judgment conditions. These findings provided neuroscientific evidence demonstrating the psychological significance of mentors to graduate students. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

Gender Inclusion and Fit in STEM

Despite progress made toward increasing women's interest and involvement in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), women continue to be underrepresented and experience less equity and inclusion in some STEM fields. In this article, I review the psychological literature relevant to understanding and mitigating women's lower fit and inclusion in STEM. Person-level explanations concerning women's abilities, interests, and self-efficacy are insufficient for explaining these persistent gaps. Rather, women's relatively lower interest in male-dominated STEM careers such as computer science and engineering is likely to be constrained by gender stereotypes. These gender stereotypes erode women's ability to experience self-concept fit, goal fit, and/or social fit. Such effects occur independently of intentional interpersonal biases and discrimination, and yet they create systemic barriers to women's attraction to, integration in, and advancement in STEM. Dismantling these systemic barriers requires a multifaceted approach to changing organizational and educational cultures at the institutional, interpersonal, and individual level.

Sexual Harassment in the Academy: Harnessing the Growing Labor Movement in Higher Education to Address Sexual Harassment Against Graduate Workers

Higher education is not immune to the epidemic of sexual harassment in the United States, particularly sexual harassment of graduate workers. This is due largely to power differentials of status and income, as academia relies on low-wage work. While the literature shows sexual harassment is prevalent across disciplines, current work to address the problem does not account for graduate worker precarity. The graduate labor movement, which addresses precarity, is beginning to tackle sexual harassment. We review how the labor and anti-gender-based violence movements in higher education should come together to prevent sexual harassment, presenting recommendations for structural changes to academia.

Neural Mechanisms of Subliminal Mentor-Student Relationship Stimuli Processing: An ERP Study

In educational contexts, mentorship roles often complicate the mentor-student relationship because mentors act not only as the closest academic ally of graduate students but also their program supervisors who can affect their timely graduation. This study examines how graduate students react to their mentors’ names when subliminally presented. A total of 63 graduate students (31 male; Mean Age = 23.450) were asked to perform an irrelevant color judgment task of valenced words (positive vs. negative relationship words) after a subliminal presentation of three different types of names (i.e., mentors, authorities, and friends). Results show that mentor and friend names elicit a greater P2 peak than authority names, whereas mentor names evoke a reduced N2 and P3 amplitude than friend and authority names. In addition, participants with a history of abusive supervision tend to have an overall decline in P2 amplitude. These event-related potential (ERP) findings suggest that mentors are perceived by students as familiar while attention-inducing figures.

How Do Nepotism and Favouritism Affect Organisational Climate?

This study seeks to determine the effect of nepotism and favouritism on organisational climate. Using the method of random sampling, 269 persons working in Lithuanian organisations were surveyed. The received data was analysed via the application of the methods of correlation and linear regression. It was determined that organisational climate is influenced significantly by variables such as the manager’s behaviour, safety and relationships with employees, values and traditions, communication, sharing of information, behaviour of employees, and interrelationships and tolerance of one another. Meanwhile, nepotism and favouritism are influenced by the lower number of climate variables (fear related to the absence of concreteness and security, such as joining an organisation, union and tolerance of individuals who have shared interests). This work fills the void in the knowledge of connections that nepotism and favouritism have with organisational climate, drawing attention to the mutual interaction between these phenomena. The article presents a discussion and the research limitations, and provides guidelines for further research.

Harassment in the Field of Medicine: Cultural Barriers to Psychological Safety

Psychologically safe organizational cultures are inherently inclusive and promote healthy sharing of power and knowledge. These conditions allow innovation to thrive and optimize member performance. Unfortunately, despite its evidence-based nature, the field of medicine continues to struggle with providing safe environments for its members. Several cultural barriers to psychological safety permit endemic harassment. These include having large power gradients, a weak ethical climate, and a number of enabling structural factors that maintain a toxic culture. Moving toward psychological safety will be challenging work, as it requires a difficult and complex analysis of the shared value system that enables the status quo. Programs and policies that promote equity, diversity, and inclusion are an important start, but they are likely insufficient on their own to achieve psychological safety. Leadership that models difficult reflection and supports inclusive transformation is the key to a safe culture shift.

Diagnosing Norms Surrounding Sexual Harassment at a Jordanian University

Sexual harassment (SH) is a form of gender-based violence (GBV) that negatively impacts women's physical, mental, social, and financial well-being. Although SH is a global phenomenon, it also is a contextualized one, with local and institutional norms influencing the ways in which harassment behavior manifests. As more women attend institutions of higher education in Jordan, these women are at increased risk of experiencing SH in university settings, with potential implications for their health and future employment. Social norms theory, which examines the informal rules governing individual behavior within groups, has been a useful framework for understanding and developing interventions against GBV globally. We sought to apply a social-norms lens to the understanding and prevention of SH at a Jordanian university. To gain a comprehensive and nuanced picture of social norms surrounding SH, we collected qualitative data using three complementary methods: focus group discussions (n = 6) with male and female students (n = 33); key informant interviews with staff and faculty (n = 5); and a public, participatory event to elicit anonymous short responses from students (n = 317). Using this data, we created a codebook incorporating social-norms components and emergent themes. As perceived by participants, SH was unacceptable yet common, characterized as a weak norm primarily because negative sanctioning of harassers was unlikely. Distal norms related to gender and tribal affiliation served to weaken further norms against SH by blaming the victim, preventing reporting, discouraging bystander intervention, and/or protecting the perpetrator. The complexity of the normative environment surrounding SH perpetration will necessitate the use of targeted, parallel approaches to change harmful norms. Strengthening weak norms against SH will require increasing the likelihood of sanctions, by revising university policies and procedures to increase accountability, increasing the acceptability of bystander intervention and reporting, and fostering tribal investment in sanctioning members who harass women. Creating dialogue that emphasizes the harmful nature of SH behaviors and safe spaces to practice positive masculinity also may be an effective strategy to change how male students interact in the presence of peers. Any social norms change intervention will need to consider the various reference groups that dictate and enforce norms surrounding SH.

Comparative analysis of sexual harassment between male and female nurses: A cross-sectional study in Greece

AIMS

The aims of this work are to compare the frequency of sexual harassment among male and female nurses in Greece and capture the reasons for not reporting sexual harassment.

BACKGROUND

The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have emphasized the ubiquity of sexual harassment in health care. Yet, limited studies have explored sexual harassment among male and female nurses and the reasons for not reporting it.

METHODS

An online cross-sectional survey was conducted using the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) to collect data from 1.264 female nurses and 507 male nurses.

RESULTS

Sixty-seven per cent of female nurses have experienced sexual harassment at least once in their working lives, whereas male nurses' exact figure was 41%. The most common type of sexual harassment for both groups was gender harassment, followed by unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. Female nurses experienced more severe adverse consequences, whereas male nurses experienced moderate negative consequences.

CONCLUSIONS

Policymakers and hospital managers should create mechanisms to allow victims to report their experiences and establish an independent committee to assess victims' complaints.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

Managers are called to change how hospitals deal with sexual harassment cases, modernize their management style, and support sexual harassment victims to break their silence without fear of negative consequences.

Fallen Between the Cracks: Protecting Research Staff From Participant-Perpetrated Harassment

There has been a call to identify populations who are at-risk for harassment. At our institution, participant-perpetrated harassment led to the development of an institution-wide program called Cultivating Respect in Research Environments (CuRRE). In this article, we describe the proactive and multipronged approach used to promote and implement the CuRRE program. We describe a policy created to set guidelines and expectations for research participants and discuss the educational and skills-based trainings delivered to principal investigators and research staff members. Research staff members completed anonymous surveys before and after the training. Over half of the attendees reported having been harassed by a participant/patient. Attendees responded favorably to the training; they felt more confident and better equipped to address participant-perpetrated harassment at the conclusion of the training. Given the dearth of literature in this area, we offer our experiences to encourage others to address this issue within their own research environment and institution.

A Systematic Literature Review of Sexual Harassment Studies with Text Mining

Sexual harassment has been the topic of thousands of research articles in the 20th and 21st centuries. Several review papers have been developed to synthesize the literature about sexual harassment. While traditional literature review studies provide valuable insights, these studies have some limitations including analyzing a limited number of papers, being time-consuming and labor-intensive, focusing on a few topics, and lacking temporal trend analysis. To address these limitations, this paper employs both computational and qualitative approaches to identify major research topics, explore temporal trends of sexual harassment topics over the past few decades, and point to future possible directions in sexual harassment studies. We collected 5320 research papers published between 1977 and 2020, identified and analyzed sexual harassment topics, and explored the temporal trend of topics. Our findings indicate that sexual harassment in the workplace was the most popular research theme, and sexual harassment was investigated in a wide range of spaces ranging from school to military settings. Our analysis shows that 62.5% of the topics having a significant trend had an increasing (hot) temporal trend that is expected to be studied more in the coming years. This study offers a bird’s eye view to better understand sexual harassment literature with text mining, qualitative, and temporal trend analysis methods. This research could be beneficial to researchers, educators, publishers, and policymakers by providing a broad overview of the sexual harassment field.

Gender and career in cardiology-a cross-sectional study

BACKGROUND

The proportion of women as leading physicians in cardiology in university medicine has stagnated and the share of women in senior positions in cardiology is low compared with other medical specialist fields. Here, we analyze the typical barriers for women as doctors in cardiology and point to issues that make the discipline less attractive for both genders.

METHODS

In a cross-sectional study, a standardized online questionnaire was sent to 3873 members of the German Cardiac Society (DGK). Answers from 567 (278 women, 289 men) were analyzed, using comparisons between groups, correlation analyses, and tests of normal distribution.

RESULTS

For 47.4% of respondents (52.0%, of women; 42.8%, of men; p = 0.049), training had lasted longer than anticipated. Average monthly gross income (full-time work) differed significantly between women and men as specialists (p = 0.004) and assistant doctors (p = 0.030). Of women, 32.1% had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. The main arguments against a career in university medicine were an extremely competitive working climate (66.7% of women, 63.2% of men), lack of work-life balance (66.7% women, 55.3% men), and excessive workload (57.8% women, 62.5% men). As strategies to increase job attractiveness, both mentioned measures to improve the work-life balance, and the flexibility of working times and improved financial provision. Women asked for gender balance at management level (76.3% vs. 32.9% of men) and opportunities for sharing management tasks (82.4% vs. 57.9%). Flatter hierarchies were requested by more men (67.1 vs. 54.8%).

CONCLUSION

Further development of the work culture in cardiology seems necessary. In order to increase the attractiveness of the field overall and to provide equal opportunities in cardiology, more targeted support should be provided to young doctors and more flexibility introduced into work.

A Statement of Commitment to Zero Tolerance of Harassment and Discrimination in Schools and Programs of Public Health

The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health convened a Task Force on Zero Tolerance of Harassment and Discrimination in 2019 to develop a policy statement and strategies for addressing harassment of all types in institutions offering public health education. We outline the premises and scholarly foundation for the development of the Statement of Commitment to Zero Tolerance of Harassment and Discrimination, the statement itself, and future plans for realizing the aspiration established in the statement. The development of this living document is predicated on the belief that it is the core responsibility of academic institutions to build the knowledge and that it is the responsibility of leaders, namely deans of schools of public health and directors of public health programs, to lead in building the shared knowledge and insist on the practices that create institutions for a better future free of harassment and discrimination. Our statement is informed by the knowledge that aggressions in the form of harassment and discrimination undermine the health and well-being of individuals, the public, and populations.

The Queen Bee phenomenon in Academia 15 years after: Does it still exist, and if so, why?

Fifteen years ago, the British Journal of Social Psychology published a set of studies on male and female academics, documenting that female faculty members were more likely than male faculty members to express stereotyped views of women at the beginning of their academic careers (PhD candidates; Ellemers et al., 2004, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 43, 3). At the same time, the self‐descriptions of female faculty members were just as masculine as those of their male colleagues. Ellemers and colleagues (2004, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 43, 3) referred to this combination of results as indicating the existence of a ‘Queen Bee (QB) phenomenon’ in academia. The present contribution investigates whether the QB phenomenon is also found among current generations of academics, investigating this in two recent samples of academic professionals (N = 462; N = 339). Our findings demonstrate that the phenomenon first documented in 2004 still exists: Advanced career female academics are more likely than their male counterparts to underestimate the career commitment of women at the beginning of their academic careers. At the same time, both male and female academics at advanced career stages describe themselves in more masculine terms than those at early career stages. We argue this indicates a response pattern in which successful women emulate the masculinity of the work environment. To indicate this, the term ‘self‐group distancing’ might be more appropriate than ‘Queen Bee effect’.

Teachers' Conflict-Inducing Attitudes and Their Repercussions on Students' Psychological Health and Learning Outcomes

This paper studied the causes and effects of negative teacher-student relationships on students' psychological health and educational outcomes, primarily due to negative teacher-teacher interactions. Survey data were collected from 130 faculty members and 746 students of 10 higher educational institutions located in different cities of the Punjab province of Pakistan. Path analysis was used to estimate results. The findings revealed that incivility among faculty members and higher discontent with university resources generates a conflict-inducing attitude in faculty members, which subsequently creates negative behavior in teachers towards students. It was further observed that hostile attitudes of faculty members towards students adversely affects the psychological health and educational outcomes of students at universities. These findings suggest that students' learning processes can be improved by controlling negative teacher-teacher interactions, which has important implications for institutions of higher learning.