Why sexual harassment training doesn’t work
Many employers are seeking legal cover, not a culture change.
Shannon Rawski first got the idea for her dissertation after listening to her former colleagues — business school professors who study human resources and recognize sexual harassment as a problem — complain about having to attend, well, sexual harassment training.
“The buzz in the hallway was ‘Why do I have to go to this? This is a waste of my time,’ ” says Rawski, now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh. “Yet these are the very faculty who are promoting that people should go to this kind of training.”
That response got Rawski thinking about why such programs are often met with disdain — even by those who help develop them — and wondering whether they work. What she found surprised her: Only a handful of scientific studies have tested the effectiveness of sexual harassment training, which is nearly ubiquitous in American workplaces and is intended to help protect workers as well as minimize an employer’s own legal and financial risks.
That may seem unsettling as a staggering wave of women and men divulge unwanted advances and illegal behavior in what seems like an epidemic of sexual harassment allegations. From Hollywood to the halls of Congress, suddenly no American workplace seems safe. And the topic of harassment training has taken center stage.
“We’ve definitely had an uptick in requests for this kind of work in the last couple of months,” said Kevin O’Neill, a principal at employment law firm Littler Mendelson who leads sexual harassment training. “It’s been this slow buildup — each example builds off the next — until you have this explosion.”
Yet as Rawski found, researchers don’t have much evidence that harassment training is effective at certain key goals: Reducing the number of incidents in a workplace, or helping shift its culture toward one that takes the issue seriously.
Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published a report that found only two research papers based on large-scale studies of antiharassment training in workplaces. The research showed that the training does have benefits — particularly in increasing awareness of what constitutes sexual harassment and how it should be reported. But it also showed that some efforts had a negative effect, such as a study in which male participants were more likely to blame the victim and less likely to report harassment.
Experts say the training has traditionally been done more as a legal defense.
“It was sort of a get-outof-jail-free card to companies,” said Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer who represents plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases. After two 1998 Supreme Court decisions, she said, “there was like a cottage industry of trainers who went in and provided training. Most of those efforts were geared toward trying to protect themselves from liability as opposed to creating a sea change in the culture.”
In a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resources Management, only 20% of employers said they offered no sexual harassment training and 59% said they offered it every year or every other year. The survey has not been updated since.
That check-the-box mentality can show up in the quality.
Many companies today use online tutorials, thanks to the cost and logistical complications of in-person training, even though some are skeptical. “I think people are just racing through it,” said Henry Perlowski, an employment lawyer based in Atlanta.
As a result, training that University of Georgia sociologist Justine Tinkler calls a “bureaucratic necessity” can actually serve to reinforce gender biases. In her research, after going through training in a lab setting, students tended to more strongly associate men with higher power and status and women with lower power and less competence.
“Nothing about my research makes me think we shouldn’t have [policy] training,” Tinkler said. “But we should think carefully about the type of it we do.”
Others say that promoting more women into leadership roles could help. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, professors Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev write that harassment is more common in workplaces where men hold most managerial roles or “core” jobs. “We already know how to reduce sexual harassment at work, and the answer is actually pretty simple: Hire and promote more women,” they write.
Perhaps most promising, O’Neill said, is that top executives have grown more receptive to one-on-one coaching. The #MeToo social media campaign, in which women shared their stories of harassment, as well as the high-profile allegations that have ensnared industry titans, has more executives open to it.
That may be in part because the recent headlines have been a reminder of the financial risks at stake.
The EEOC’s report noted that since 2010, employers have paid $699 million to employees alleging harassment via its pre-litigation process and cited an estimate of settlements and judgments in 2012 that racked up more than $356 million in costs. These don’t include indirect costs such lower productivity or higher turnover.
“The economic reality of this is hitting home more than it ever has,” O’Neill said. “It’s like the blind spot has been removed about the hazards posed to their internal culture. Their eyes are opened much wider than I’ve seen before.”