Beneath the Surface of the Sexual Harassment Label: A Mixed Methods Study of Young Working Women

The now extensive literature on workplace sexual harassment provides compelling evidence for the persistence and pervasiveness of the phenomenon, with about half of all U.S. women experiencing harassment at some point in their working lives (Fitzgerald and Cortina2018). One thought-provoking and counterintuitive finding from this literature is that relatively few of these women use the label "sexual harassment" in understanding their experiences (Magley et al.1999; McLaughlin et al.2012). The study described here explores definitional and motivational explanations for this low level of self-labeling, using data from questionnaires and in-depth interviews of 22 self-labeling and 20 non-labeling U.S. female college students who were victims of employment-based sexual harassment. Participants' responses provided insight into normative beliefs about what constitutes harassment and the circumstances under which it occurs, and they suggest that the correspondence between experiences and normative definitions of harassment affects whether women self-label. However, the results also suggest that some women think of their experiences as something other than harassment in order to avoid negative consequences, such as damage to their self-identity as well as blame and derision from others.