While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.
McLaughlin and her co-authors examined data from the 2003 and 2004 waves of the Youth Development Study (YDS), a prospective study of adolescents that began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school district and has
continued near annually since.
Respondents were approximately 29 and 30 years old during the 2003 and 2004 waves. The analysis was supplemented with in-depth interviews with a subset of the YDS survey respondents.
The sociologists found that, in addition to workplace power, gender expression was a strong predictor of workplace harassment.
These findings will be presented at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.