Why correcting social norms may help curb sexual harassment
In a new policy brief, Olle Folke, researcher at SITE, examines evidence from the Norwegian military showing that simple information can make recruits less tolerant of sexual harassment by correcting mistaken beliefs about what their peers think.
Sexual harassment remains widespread, and women face higher exposure from colleagues and managers in male-dominated work environments. Can simple information change workplace culture and reduce harassment? This policy brief presents evidence from a randomized field experiment in the Norwegian military. The results show that information that corrects misperceptions can substantially reduce tolerance for sexual harassment. The results also offer guidance for future experiments by identifying an important measurement challenge for detecting behavioral change.
Sexual harassment carries significant costs for individuals and organizations, including poorer health, higher turnover, and higher levels of economic gender inequality (e.g., Folke and Rickne 2022). While prevention is urgent, the most common prevention methods face substantial critique. Employee training can lead to resistance or backlash from potential harassers, and reporting systems fail when fear of retaliation holds victims and witnesses back from making reports. These problems have led experts to call for research on organization-level solutions that prevent sexual harassment by reshaping workplace contexts and cultures (Cortina and Areguin 2021).
Key points from the FREE Network policy brief
- Correcting mistaken beliefs about what colleagues think can substantially reduce tolerance for sexual harassment, and part of that change can remain several weeks after the information is provided.
- The intervention used only two pieces of factual information - that most peers viewed sexualized jokes as harassment and that women performed as well as men on military tests - showing that a relatively simple and low-cost approach can influence attitudes.
- Measuring whether harassment itself decreases is difficult because successful awareness efforts may make people more likely to recognize and report problematic behaviour, which can hide genuine improvements in workplace conduct.
Click here to read the full policy brief to learn more
Meet the author
Olle Folke, Professor, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE).
Email: olle.folke@hhs.se
About SITE
The Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) is a leading research and policy center on economic development in low-and middle income countries, with a particular emphasis on transition in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe.
About the FREE Network
The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE Network) is a joint initiative by SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CenEA (Szczecin), ISET-PI (Tbilisi) and KSE Institute (Kiev). Together, these research institutes form an extensive network of leading academic experts on economic issues in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
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