Service sector leads in reporting of sex cases

NEWDELHI: After details of alleged sexual harassment against powerful film producer Harvey Weinstein were published in early October, women from various industries across the world have narrated their own accounts of exploitation.

Credible data on the extent of sexual exploitation across all industries in India is hard to come by, but regulations introduced by the capital markets regulator a few years ago allow us to examine the trends in reported instances of sexual harassment across India’s top 100 companies.

These companies belonging to the BSE 100 universe were mandated to report the number of women employees in their ranks, and the number of sexual harassment charges made by them since 2012-13.

For this analysis, we consider 52 of these firms for which consistent data is available for the past five financial years (from fiscal 2013 to fiscal 2017). Some firms have been excluded because of accounting changes, mergers and so on. Others have been excluded because they have not clearly mentioned either the number of women employees or the number of sexual harassment charges in one or more years in the period under consideration.

The data shows that the number of reported instances of harassment has risen over the years. The ratio of the number of harassment cases to the number of women employees on company payrolls has also gone up.

This may not necessarily indicate that the incidence of harassment per se has increased. As the Weinstein episode reveals, sexual harassment cases tend to be under-reported.

This is also true of gender crimes in India in general. Thus, part of the increase in the proportion of sexual harassment cases may simply reflect a ‘reporting effect’ owing to a greater awareness of redressal mechanisms.

The number of companies reporting instances of sexual harassment has also been rising over the years, suggesting that companies may gradually be putting in place monitoring and redressal mechanisms. In fiscal 2016, four companies did not report data on sexual harassment. This number declined to two in fiscal 2017.The largest chunk of sexual harassment cases arises in services such as information technology (IT) and banking.