Sexual Harassment is Rampant: Help End It

Sexual harassment is common in the architecture profession. Among female architecture and construction professionals surveyed, 85 percent reported experiencing sexual harassment. Of the male survey respondents, 25 percent reported having been harassed. These percentages are roughly twice those of the overall workforce across occupations.  

The most common form of harassment experienced by female architecture professionals was sexist comments (64 percent), followed by uncomfortable jokes or stories (50 percent). Unwanted physical contact was experienced by 27 percent of women surveyed, while 15 percent were faced with sexual or other inappropriate images. Women in architecture experience harassment from co-workers (58 percent of white women, 59 percent of women of color), contractors and subcontractors (49 percent of white women, 64 percent of women of color), and clients (36 percent of white women, 35 percent of women of color), the AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation into bias in the architecture profession found.

Sexual harassment can have negative impacts on the target’s well-being and productivity. Targets must direct energy toward avoiding further harassment and expend political capital to address the harassment while trying to prevent being retaliated against. Five percent of white women and six percent of women of color in architecture reported losing opportunities like a plum assignment, raise, or promotion owing to rebuffing a sexual advance. This rate is twice as high for women as it is for men. Nearly half of women who experienced sexual harassment changed employers owing to the harassment, the AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation found. The disruption to these women’s career paths also comes at a cost to their original employers who lose their talents.

Sexual harassment training that focuses on “forbidden behaviors” does not reduce harassment and might even make it worse, according to the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review.   What has proven effective is “Bystander Training”—training all employees to intervene when they witness harassment or other unwanted behaviors. This intervention can take many forms and may include some or all of the following:

• Interrupting the unwanted interaction

• Helping the target remove themselves from the situation

• Telling the target you heard or saw what happened and asking if they are OK

• Assuring the target they did nothing wrong

• Offering to go with the target to report the behavior

• Confronting the perpetrator during the unwanted interaction, if it is safe to do so

• Privately explaining to the perpetrator why their actions disturbed you.

While the most egregious forms of harassment typically take place away from witnesses, perpetrators often first test boundaries with smaller transgressions. By creating a culture where no level of harassment is tolerated and all employees are empowered to act, the escalation of bad behavior can be reduced or prevented. In this, architecture might have an advantage over other professions. The authors of the AIA/The Center for WorkLife Law investigation found, “the architecture profession is unique among fields we have studied in the prevalence of distaste for sexual harassment expressed by men.”

Bystander training, the New York Times reports, is most effective when it’s conducted in-person with an interactive program that is at least four hours long (allowing time for participants to rehearse responses to different scenarios) and tailored to a particular workplace. In addition, having a male trainer (and specifically a white male trainer) is most likely to reduce backlash to the training.

Other strategies for reducing sexual harassment described in the Harvard Business Review include:

• Training managers in how to address harassment

• Listing a large number and range of people for employees to report harassment to, so as to increase the odds of the target feeling comfortable reporting to one of them; 70 percent of harassment goes unreported, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

• Tracking and publicizing data regarding instances of harassment and progress toward addressing the problem

• Creating a task force of employees to identify problems and propose solutions

• Increasing the percentage of female managers.

While some of these strategies are best suited to larger firms, there is one proven strategy firms of any size can implement: Improving gender equity in pay, work assignments, hiring, and promotion.

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James Gillray, Engraver, 1796 (Library of Congress)