Sexual Harassment
A 2011 US study similarly found that the construction industry had the highest rates of sexual harassment, followed by transportation and utilities. One survey of senior level women working in Silicon Valley found that 90% of women had witnessed sexist behaviour; 87% had been on the receiving end of demeaning comments by male colleagues; and 60% had received unwanted sexual advances. Of that 60%, more than half had been propositioned more than once, and 65% had been propositioned by a superior. One in three women surveyed had felt afraid for her personal safety. Some of the worst experiences of harassment come from women whose work brings them into close contact with the general public. In these instances, harassment all too often seems to spill over into violence.
The inadequacy of procedures to deal with the kind of harassment that female workers face is itself likely also a result of a data gap. Leadership in all sectors is male-dominated and the reality is that men do not face this kind of aggression in the way women do. And so many organisations don’t think to put in procedures to deal adequately with sexual harassment and violence. It’s another example of how much a diversity of experience at the top matters for everyone – and how much it matters if we are serious about closing the data gap.
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Me Too Movement
Research has found that nurses are subjected to ‘more acts of violence than police officers or prison guards’. A recent US study similarly found that ‘healthcare workers required time off work due to violence four times more often than other types of injury.
According to the International Council of Nurses, ‘nurses are the healthcare workers most at risk’ – and the vast majority of nurses are women. The absence of gender analysis means that most of the research doesn’t factor in the chronic under-reporting of sexual violence: only 12% of the workers report.
‘We don’t report sexual violence because it happens so frequently,’ explained one woman who had been ‘grabbed many times’.