Hello. I thought I'd begin with a synopsis of my experience in the area of workplace sexual harassment in order to put some parameters around the scope of my work and experience in the area.
I am a professor of employment relations in the business school at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve held an academic role for the last 10 years, prior to which I had clinical and research roles in the health sector. I’ve studied the phenomenon of workplace sexual harassment for most of the last 10 years, but most intensively in the last three years through an Australian Research Council-funded large grant.
In this project my co-investigator, Associate Professor Sara Charlesworth from the University of South Australia, and I explored a number of what we feel to be important data sets which comprised in-depth interviews with over 70 expert policy and practitioners from around Australia. We interviewed 30 targets of sexual harassment and talked to each of those for a couple of hours. We have looked at published legal decisions over the time. We've analyzed around 400 media articles from Australia, the U.K., Canada and the U.S. The most intensive and we think innovative part of the project involved an analysis of around 300 detailed hard-copy files of sexual harassment complaints from all nine federal, state and territory equal opportunity jurisdictions. In looking at that data we saw detailed patterns of the nature of complaints, the characteristics of the people involved, how complaints proceeded through formal alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, and the nature of settlement outcomes, including financial settlements.
We have published some of this work, but as you'll appreciate, the academic pathway to publishing is a long one and there is still a lot of work which hasn't quite hit the public realm.
Concurrently, while undertaking this research, I have worked closely with the Australian Human Rights Commission in developing two successive prevalence surveys on workplace sexual harassment that were administered to a largely representative sample of the Australian population. These kind of prevalence surveys, particularly over time, are somewhat unusual in the world. I’ve also written an extensive report for the Australian Human Rights Commission that discussed the critical role of bystanders in preventing and responding to workplace sexual harassment.
The committee members are no doubt well aware of the continued prevalence of sexual harassment and its damaging consequences, so in the time I have left I thought I would briefly review some of the key findings from our work that really point to the ongoing challenges beyond the prevalence and consequences of sexual harassment. I believe these issues warrant specific further attention in order to redress what's a persistent, pervasive and obviously gendered problem. I can only raise these issues briefly, but there may be some issues that you may want to pick up in terms of further questioning.
First, our research showed—and this is very important—that grievance mechanisms in organizations were frequently inadequate. Indeed, many of the complaints we saw that escalated outside of the workplace to commissions were as much related to dissatisfaction with organizational processes as they were to the sexually harassing behaviours per se. Key concerns were around formal and informal channels of reporting; long timeframes in responding; issues around vicarious liability and legal risk; line managers who dealt with complaints as an interpersonal issue rather than a legitimate concern that required attention; and reprisals experienced by targets who reported the problem.
Second, we have argued for a focus on bystanders in more effectively preventing and responding to sexual harassment. Bystander interventions have been found to be very effective in other areas of violence prevention, including dating and intimate partner violence, and we argue could be potentially adapted to the workplace. Our empirical work in the area showed that sexual harassment has ripple effects that extend well beyond the individual target in that bystanders—and we define bystanders broadly—both within and outside the workplace can and do have active roles in supporting the target and preventing further incidents. However, we also found, unfortunately, substantial evidence of bystanders who could have acted but did not act, and worse still, of bystanders who joined in with the behaviours. This had particularly devastating consequences for targets.
Third, we've argued that sexual harassment is too often characterized as a sexual advance by one individual, a bad apple, towards another, the victim. In particular, sexual harassment is often thought of as salacious conduct by a male boss towards a female subordinate. This characterization, we argue, relegates the problem to the private sphere and identifies it as one that should be principally resolved between one individual and another, while neglecting the fact that some work settings are more oppressively gendered than others. We've argued that different workplace contexts can shape the perceptions of workers, the conditions and power dynamics that underpin sexual harassment, and also, importantly, non-sexual forms of harassment and discrimination that disadvantage women and some men. We concur with Margaret Thornton that these more subtle forms of discrimination and harassment may actually reveal more about gendered practices in organizations than the blatant sexualized conduct that's often equated with the high profile media cases that we read about.
Fourth, evidence from details of settlements of sexual harassment complaints in equal opportunity files showed that even within the acknowledged individualized limitations of alternative dispute resolution, or ADR, which is that the process fails to address broader systemic issues that allow sexual harassment, ADR is limited in what it can provide sexual harassment complainants. For example, our data showed that complainants rarely achieved an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and injustice, and that's often what they came to the process seeking primarily. The process is also limited in providing financial compensation. Our data showed that the main financial compensation in these cases was around $8,000 Australian. This hadn't changed a lot over time, and in fact, this figure is slightly inflated because it also included, in some cases, statutory employment entitlements, including annual leave.
Another important finding from the analysis of complaint files was that only around one in six complainants remained employed in the organization where the sexual harassment allegedly took place. We think it's possible that the severing of employment relationships is a particularly problematic issue in relation to sexual harassment compared to other forms of discrimination because it's a particularly personal and affronting issue. Nevertheless, the fact that few complainants remained employed in the organization where the sexual harassment took place is problematic for the conciliation process, because it is an interest-based process in which it's assumed that the parties come to the table with some kind of motivation to restore and repair the relationship at hand.
Finally, the essentially privatized nature of the conciliation process works to constrain the ability of both parties, but particularly the complainant, to come to the table with informed perspectives. We've argued for a more systematic aggregation and publication of de-identified data so that both complainants and respondents can come to that process with more informed perspectives.
That concludes my opening statement.
