The Latest Research: Harassment of Female Bosses

Rising to senior levels in your organizations and industries, may still not protect you from harassment and abuse. In fact, new research finds it may actually attract more. And the story is the same across the world.

The researchers: The Swedish Institute for Social Research at Stockholm University, in collaboration with researchers from the US and Japan

The findings: Female supervisors experienced between 30 and 100 percent more sexual harassment than other employees, in Sweden, the US, and Japan.

It’s worse for female supervisors at lower and mid-level positions of leadership, and worse when the majority of the supervisor’s subordinates are male.

As a result, women face another hurdle to overcome when rising into senior levels, and this can become another deterrence for women seeking advancement in their organizations.

What the researchers said:

"When we first started to study sexual harassment, we expected a higher exposure for women with less power in the workplace. Instead we found the contrary. When you think about it, there are logical explanations: a supervisor is exposed to new groups of potential perpetrators. She can be harassed both from her subordinates and from higher-level management within the company. More harassment from these two groups is also what we saw when we asked the women who had harassed them," says Johanna Rickne, Professor of Economics at SOFI.

"Sexual harassment means that women's career advancement comes at a higher cost than men's, especially in male-dominated industries and firms. Additional survey data from the United States and Japan showed that harassment of supervisors was not only more common than for employees, but was also followed by more negative professional and social consequences. This included getting a reputation of being a 'trouble maker' and missing out on promotions or training," says Olle Folke, affiliated researcher at SOFI and associate professor at Uppsala University.

Read more in the Winter 2020 Daedalus.

What else?

Studies of online abuse of major female figures underscores a similar point. Amnesty International studied female politicians in India and found they are much more likely to be targets of online abuse. The study found that 13.8% of the tweets that mentioned 95 women politicians in the study were either “problematic” or “abusive”. The more prominent the politician, the more they are attacked.

Read more in Amnesty International 2020.