Victor Sojo: Measuring "Modern" Workplace Gender Harassment Across Gender Identity and Sexuality Groups

Abstract: The most prevalent form of sexual harassment is gender harassment, which encompasses personal experiences of verbal, physical, or symbolic behaviours that express derogatory, hostile, and offensive attitudes about members of one gender. Leskinen and Cortina (2014) conceptualized and developed a multidimensional measure of ‘modern’ workplace gender harassment experienced by women, comprising five dimensions: the well-studied Sexist Remarks, Sexually Crude/Offensive Behaviour and three other dimensions: Infantilization, Work-family policing, and Gender policing. The objectives of this study were to adapt Leskinen and Cortina’s (2014) gender harassment scale to also capture harassment experienced by men and LGBTIAQ+ workers, to provide evidence of the construct validity of the adapted scale, and to estimate the prevalence of gender harassment in a sample of 1155 Australian workers in general and across gender (i.e., men versus women) and sexuality (straight vs LGBTIAQ+). A confirmatory factor analysis of the Adapted Gender Harassment Scale supported the expanded scale structure, and measurement invariance analysis demonstrated the replication of this factor structure across gender and sexuality groups. The internal consistent, correlations between the Adapted Gender Harassment Scale and its sub-scales, gender, sexuality, measures of incivility, sexual coercion, and unwanted sexual attention provided further evidence of the concurrent and construct validity of the adapted scale. This Adapted Gender Harassment Scale provides a tool able to meaningfully capture experiences of low intensity but relatively high frequency gendered abuse across gender and sexuality groups.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash