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[content note: sexual harassment]

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Recent discussion of sexual harassment at work has focused on a few high-profile industries. But there has been relatively little credible research as to how rates really differ by occupation type.

There are many surveys of harassment rates in specific industries, but they can\\u2019t be credibly compared with one another. The percent of people who report sexual harassment varies wildly from survey to survey \\u2013 thus studies finding that anywhere from\\xa012 percent\\xa0to\\xa048 percent\\xa0to\\xa060 percent\\xa0to\\xa085 percent\\xa0of women have been harassed at work. If a survey shows that\\xa060% of female nurses\\xa0get sexually harassed at work, does that mean nurses are victimized particularly often (because more than 12%) or are unusually safe (because less than 85%)? It doesn\\u2019t matter, because\\xa0another study says\\xa0only 19% of nurses get harassed.

Why do all these numbers differ so dramatically? The most important issue seems to be how you ask the question. \\u201cHave you ever been harassed?\\u201d gets numbers more like 12%; giving a long list of specific behaviors and asking \\u201cHave you ever experienced any of these?\\u201d gets numbers closer to 85%, depending on what the behaviors are. Surveys also differ on whether they ask all employees or just women, whether they include a time frame (eg \\u201c\\u2026in the past two years\\u201d), whether they specify that it had to be at work vs. work-related events, and whether they include witnessing someone else\\u2019s harassment. Taking these surveys entirely seriously would lead to the conclusion that Uber has\\xa0the lowest sexual harassment rate\\xa0of any company or industry in the world; I choose not to take them seriously.

This means we need investigations that use the same methodology across multiple fields. Whenever the media talks about this \\u2013 see eg the Washington Post\\u2019s\\xa0The Industries With The Worst Sexual Harassment Problem\\xa0\\u2013 they\\u2019re working off of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission\\u2019s records. But these are totally unsuitable for the task \\u2013 they just report raw number of claims per industry. The industries that rank lowest in EEOC\\u2019s data tend to be small industries with very few women \\u2013 for example, taken seriously the WaPo\\u2019s graph shows that mining has the least problem with sexual harassment of any industry in the world. Is this thanks to their uniquely progressive culture \\u2013 or because there are practically no female miners? I\\u2019m going to say the second one. The takeaway that most real researchers take from the EEOC claims is that the lowest-paying and most mundane occupations \\u2013 retail, restaurant work, hotel work, etc \\u2013 have much higher sexual harassment rates than the prestigious occupations people generally talk about. Eyeballing the data, this looks basically true. But trying to get anything more fine-grained than that out of EEOC is basically hopeless.

I only know of two surveys that have even attempted to compare different fields in a principled way, and neither really inspires confidence.