Why doesn’t harassment training work?

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.

“My university announced they needed to have it because they hadn’t in three years, and 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 at 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 intended to help protect workers as well as minimize an employer’s own legal and financial risks.

“We don’t really have a whole body of work,” Rawski said.

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.

Speaker Paul Ryan, RWis., said Tuesday that the House would make training mandatory for members and staffers after female lawmakers described pervasive, unwanted sexual comments or advances.

It’s been the subject of late-night comedy, too, with Cecily Strong on “Saturday Night Live” playing an exasperated, Purell-slurping “Claire from HR” who quizzes Colin Jost about appropriate workplace behavior. (”Remember, there’s no wrong answers here. Just super-wrong answers.”)

And employment lawyers say they’re hearing from clients who want to make sure their training and coaching are up to speed.

“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 the 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 sexual harassment training is effective at certain key goals: Reducing the number of incidents in a workplace, or helping to 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 where male participants were more likely to blame the victim and less likely to report harassment.

“In most cases, employers are creating these policies more to protect themselves than to protect employees,” said Lauren Edelman, a professor at the law school of the University of California at Berkeley. “We don’t know when harassment training is effective, and we have reason to believe that maybe it’s counterproductive in some cases.”

Experts say the training has traditionally been done more as a legal defense.

In 1998, following two Supreme Court cases, more companies began adopting sexual harassment policies and training as an “affirmative defense.” It has several parts. To help minimize their liability for hostile work environments, employers must prove that they offered policies, training and complaint procedures. And then, that they responded to complaints promptly and thoroughly.

“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 the 1998 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.”

As a result, the training became something of an imposition to employers. Some companies willing to spend millions of dollars on talent development will balk at spending tens of thousands on harassment training, Littler’s O’Neill said.

The Society for Human Resources Management found in a 2010 survey that only 20 percent of employers said they offered no sexual harassment training and 59 percent said they offered it every year or every other year. The survey has not been updated since.

Eden King, an associate professor at Rice University, has testified before the EEOC that face-to-face training that lasts more than four hours and includes active participation with a supervisor is more likely to be effective.

Still “much of it is rather cartoonish in character,” Berkeley’s Edelman said.

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.