Tag Archives | Women’s Movement

The Surprising Decline of Workplace Sexual Harassment Incidence in the U.S. Federal Workforce

Michael J. Rosenfeld

Sociological Science October 7, 2024
10.15195/v11.a34


U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) surveys document a decline of more than 50 percent between 1987 and 2016 in the percentage of women working for the federal government who have been sexually harassed (narrowly or broadly defined) in the prior two years. This decline has been underappreciated due to the infrequency of USMSPB surveys and the delayed release of the USMSPB report based on the 2016 survey. The decline in workplace sexual harassment of women has taken place across all federal agencies and at all workplace gender balances. While, in 1987, there was a strong positive correlation between male predominance in the workplace and women’s report of sexual harassment, this association was greatly diminished by 2016. The formerly substantial gender divide in attitudes toward sexual harassment was also mostly diminished by 2016. By extrapolating the USMSPB surveys of federal workers to the entire U.S. workforce, I estimate that 4.8 million U.S. women were harassed at work in 2016 (using a narrow definition of harassment) and 7.6 million U.S. women were harassed at work in 1987 when the female workforce was substantially smaller. More than 700 women were sexually harassed at work in the United States in 2016 for every sexual harassment complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The observed decline in sexual harassment has implications for theories about law and social change.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Michael J. Rosenfeld: Stanford University
E-mail: mrosenfe@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: The idea of this article started from discussions with research assistant Camilla Camargo about a research project comparing the history of coworker dating with workplace sexual harassment. Research assistant Jasleen Gosal excavated some obscure aspects of the history of federal government agencies training programs with respect to sexual harassment. Thanks to the staff at the Merit Systems Protection Board who answered many questions about surveys and data. The following people gave feedback on earlier drafts of the article: Hannah Tessler, Alisa Feldman, Michaela Simmons, Amy Hontalas, Kimberly Higuera, Justine Tinkler, and the Stanford Graduate Family Workshop. A previous version of these results was presented at the Population Association of America Conference in 2024.

Funding: None.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All original data, codes, and analysis are available at OpenICPSR, https://doi.org/10.3886/E209051V1.

  • Citation: Rosenfeld, J. Michael. 2024. “The Surprising Decline of Workplace Sexual Harassment Incidence in the U.S. Federal Workforce.” Sociological Science 11: 934-964.
  • Received: July 24, 2024
  • Accepted: September 13, 2024
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a34


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