This research project received funding through the 2023 Institute for Diversity Science Seed Grant Program
Principal Investigator: Chloe Hart, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, UW-Madison
Abstract: How widespread is workplace sexual harassment among gender minorities (transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary people)? Strikingly, this question remains unaddressed in the sexual harassment literature. In Study 1, I propose an online survey of workplace sexual harassment experiences that samples transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary people alongside cisgender women and cisgender men, to fill this gap. I will also capture qualitative detail about sexual harassment experiences alongside the prevalence of workplace sexual harassment experiences among this population in this survey. In Study 2, I posit that beyond potentially facing high rates, workplace sexual harassment may be damaging to transgender and nonbinary people for a second reason: their experiences may be viewed more skeptically, less sympathetically, and less worth of organizational investigation than sexual harassment experienced by cisgender women. I propose an online survey experiment to evaluate this hypothesis. This pair of studies lays the groundwork for interventions ranging from creating gender-inclusive best practices for policies and trainings about sexual harassment, to developing interventions to address biased assessments of gender minorities’ sexual harassment experiences (should they exist).