The Changing Nature of Employment-Related Sexual Harassment: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Government, 1978–1994

Heather Antecol and Deborah Cobb-Clark

ILR Review, 2004, vol. 57, issue 3, 443-461

Abstract: This paper examines the changing nature of attitudes toward and reports of sexual harassment using data for 1978–94 drawn from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) of the U.S. federal government. The authors find that although unwanted sexual behavior reported by federal government employees changed only slightly in overall incidence over the period, its pattern changed noticeably. Unwanted sexual attention by supervisors, for example, declined in incidence; crude and offensive behavior by co-workers increased; and the likelihood that harassment would occur only once (rather than repeatedly) increased. Employees' attitudes toward sexual harassment changed markedly, with a dramatically increased willingness to define unwanted sexual behavior as sexual harassment. This trend appears to have been due not to changes in employees' demographic, human capital, and job characteristics, but rather to structural changes in their views of what constitutes sexual harassment.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/001979390405700307 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ilrrev:v:57:y:2004:i:3:p:443-461

DOI: 10.1177/001979390405700307

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in ILR Review from Cornell University, ILR School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().