Violence Against Women at Work

Abi Adams, Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix (enix@usc.edu) and Ning Zhang (ning.zhang@economics.ox.ac.uk)
Additional contact information
Emily Nix: https://www.marshall.usc.edu/personnel/emily-nix

No 64, Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: The #MeToo movement has demonstrated that assaults between colleagues are an internationally relevant phenomenon. In this paper, we link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify assaults between colleagues, and the economic consequences for victims, perpetrators, and firms. This new approach to observe when one colleague attacks another overcomes previous data constraints limiting evidence on this phenomenon to self-reported surveys that do not identify perpetrators. We document large, persistent labor market impacts of between-colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking female colleagues. Perpetrators’ relative economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Turning to broader implications for firm recruitment and retention, we find that male-female violence causes a decline in women at the firm, both because fewer new women are hired and current female employees leave. There is no change in hiring from within existing employees’ networks, ruling out supply-side explanations for the reduction in new female hires via "whisper networks". Management practices play a key role in mediating the impacts on the wider workforce. Only male-managed firms lose women. Female managers do one important thing differently: fire perpetrators.

Keywords: Management practices; Sexual harassment; Workplace conflict; Gender inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J81 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/institute/working-papers-institute/iwp64.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Violence against Women at Work* (2024)
Working Paper: Violence Against Women at Work (2022)
Working Paper: Violence against women at work (2022)
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:fip:fedmoi:95880

DOI: 10.21034/iwp.64

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel (kate.s.hansel@mpls.frb.org).