Causes and Consequences of Workplace Sexual Harassment: An Evidence-Based Data Analysis in Taiwan
Huan-Jung Huang*
Abstract
Sexual harassment has emerged as a significant social problem. Although a large number of researchers have investigated the related issues of workplace sexual harassment, there have been few empirical and nationally representative studies of the prevalence and correlative factors of workplace sexual harassment. This paper tries to use evidence-based data analysis to fill the gap.
This paper uses “gender equality in the workplace survey” of secondary data to examine the causes and consequences of sexual harassment in the workplace. Firstly, the paper introduces the concept, prevalence and severity of workplace sexual harassment. Secondly, it discusses the different perspectives of sexual harassment at work, including socio-cultural theory, sex role spillover, contact hypothesis, formal power and informal power, and organizational culture and climate perspective as a foundation of the hypothesis presented in this paper. It then presents individual and organizational factors that influence sexual harassment, individual factors include victims' gender, age, marital status, education attainment; organizational factors, include organizational hierarchy, organizational characteristics, job context and internal complaint system. Furthermore, the paper explores the impact of sexual harassment on the organization, including work assignments, performance evaluation, promotion, training, benefits and turnover. And finally, based on the hypotheses, this study develops an analytical framework to examine the potential causes and consequences of workplace harassment. As shown by the statistical analysis, both individual and organizational factors contribute to harassment, which has a negative impact on an organization's employees.
Keywords: workplace sexual harassment, gender equality, characteristics of victims, secondary data analysis, evidence-based data
* Associate Professor, Department of Social and Public Affairs, University of Taipei. e-mail: hrhuang@utaipei.edu.tw; carlhuan@yahoo.com.tw.