Essay on Risk of Sexual Harassment is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on Risk of Sexual Harassment at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

Various theoretical perspectives exist for understanding why sexual harassment happens and who is at risk for being sexually harassed. Most perspectives have an underlying agreement that power, whether it be from such sources as gender or position in the organization, is at the core of most sexual harassment. At this point, though, there is no unifying theoretical perspective for explaining sexual harassment. Some of the approaches overemphasize certain types of sexual harassment while excluding others. The primary explanation for why sexual harassment occurs is based in the power derived from culturally legitimated power and status differences between men and women. This type of explanation fits with the "dominance" model that emphasizes sexual harassment's origins in patriarchal society. This model predicts that women are most likely to experience sexual harassment because of the economic, physical, and other forms of power men hold in workplaces and society. Within this model, there is little room for explaining same-sex harassment.

A second approach points to a sociobiological source for sexual harassment. Women are the most likely targets because men harass women out of the "natural" outcome of their biological sex drive. This approach is not supported by recent evidence that most sexual harassment is not based in sexual desire. Rather it is based in hostility toward women or men. Similar to the power perspective, an emphasis on sociobiological factors also ignores same-sex harassment. Sexual harassment is also perceived to be an outgrowth of the gender socialization process and is a mechanism by which men assert power and dominance over women both at work and in society.

Within this perspective, some research demonstrates that numerically skewed sex ratios in work situations, such as female-dominated and male-dominated work groups, play a prominent role in explanations of sexual harassment. Some approaches focus on the gender roles associated with female- and male-dominated work situations, while others discuss the issue in terms of numerical dominance of males over females in certain workplaces. With much of the focus on male-to-female harassment, male-dominated workplaces pose the biggest threat of harassment, since men both numerically and normatively dominate. More nuanced approaches draw on theories of masculinity to explain sexual harassment. For example, recent research implicates heterosexual norms of masculinity in the way that male coworkers ignore the harm of watching or "checking out" their female coworkers.

Organizational culture and context is also theorized to explain the occurrence of sexual harassment. Research demonstrates that if an organization has a culture whereby management does not tolerate harassment, workers are less likely to experience unwanted sexual behaviors. Examinations of sexualized workplaces move beyond this work to emphasize how organizational culture contributes to how sexual behaviors are interpreted as harassing, tolerable, or pleasurable. By bridging both power and gender socialization approaches, this research demonstrates that the context of work matters for what it means to be sexually harassed. For example, female editors working for a male pornographic magazine experience a daily litany of sexual joking and pornographic material, yet they do not define these as sexual harassment. Only when jokes become directed at them personally are behaviors defined as harassment. Taking into account the context of where one works helps understand not only who is at risk of sexual harassment but who is likely to label their experiences as sexual harassment.

The U.S. legal definition has been the prime mover behind the development of sexual harassment as a legal construct and social problem in other countries. However, countries such as France and Austria, along with the European Union itself, have developed laws focusing only on the sexual abuse of power aspect that is now eschewed by feminist critics of the U.S. harassment law. The reasons for this are not simply that European lawmakers, feminists, and the public view U.S. law as a consequence of American "prudishness" about displays of sexuality in the workplace. For example, the harassment law in France emphasizes harassment as an abuse of hierarchical power, not as sexual harassment between coworkers. What is considered sexual harassment in the law and in society is bounded by the national and organizational context of workers.

Bibliography:

1) Berdahl, Jennifer. 2007. "Harassment Based on Sex: Protecting Social Status in the Context of Gender Hierarchy." Academy of Management Review 32(2):641-58.

2) Dellinger, Kirsten and Christine Williams. 2002. "The Locker Room and the Dorm Room: Workplace Norms and the Boundaries of Sexual Harassment in Magazine Editing." Social Problems 49(2):242-57.

3) Fitzgerald, Lousie, S. L. Shullman, N. Bailey, M. Richards, J. Swecker, A. Gold, A. J. Omerod, and L. Weitzman. 1988. "The Incidence and Dimensions of Sexual Harassment in Academia and the Workplace." Journal of Vocational Behavior 32:152-75.

4) Giuffre, Patti A. and Christine L. Williams. 1994. "Boundary Lines: Labeling Sexual Harassment in Restaurants." Gender & Society 8:378-401.

5) Gruber, James E. 1998. "The Impact of Male Work Environments and Organizational Policies on Women's Experiences of Sexual Harassment." Gender & Society 12(3):301-20.

6) Quinn, Beth. 2002. "Sexual Harassment and Masculinity: The Power and Meaning of 'Girl Watching.'" Gender & Society 16(3):386-402.

7) Saguy, Abigail. 2003. What Is Sexual Harassment? From Capital Hill to the Sorbonne. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

8) Schultz, Vicki. 2003. "The Sanitized Workplace." Yale Law Journal 112:2061-193.

9) Uggen, Christopher and Amy Blackstone. 2004. "Sexual Harassment as a Gendered Expression of Power." American Sociological Review 69(Feb):64-92.

10) Welsh, Sandy. 1999. "Gender and Sexual Harassment." Annual Review of Sociology 25:169-90.

11) Welsh, Sandy, Jacquie Carr, Barb MacQuarrie, and Audrey Huntley. 2006. "I'm Not Thinking of It as Sexual Harassment: Understanding Harassment across Race, Class and Citizenship." Gender & Society 20(1):87-107.

12) Zippel, Kathrin. 2006. The Politics of Sexual Harassment: A Comparative Study of the United States, the European Union and Germany. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.