The Impact of Sexual Harassment on Military Personnel: Is It the Same for Men and Women?

Abstract

Research in the civilian workplace has documented the serious psychological, health-related, and job-related outcomes of sexual harassment of women by men. The question of whether men experience sexual harassment similarly has more recently been proposed (Berdahl, Magley, & Waldo, 1996; Popovich, Campbell, Everton, Mangan, & Godinho, 1994; Vaux, 1993; Waldo, Berdahl, & Fitzgerald, 1998; Waldo & Magley, 1996), resulting in considerable debate regarding not only the extent of the outcomes of such experiences but also the sex of the offender. This study directly compared outcomes of sexual harassment for men and women utilizing data from the U.S. Department of Defense's (1995) recent gender issues survey. The results of both linear and quadratic regression analyses indicate that within the range of similar experiences, sexual harassment exerts a negative effect on male and female personnel in similar ways on 3 sets of outcomes: psychological, health, and job-related. Three differences emerged, however, suggesting differential experiences of sexual harassment for men and women. First, women were more likely to have been sexually harassed than were men. Second, women experienced sexual harassment at higher frequencies than did men; the negative impact on women, both individually and as a group, is thus considerably more pronounced. Finally, women almost always experienced sexual harassment from men; men were somewhat more likely to experience such behaviors from men than from women.

Notes

1 As in the case oftargets (see Fitzgerald, Magley, Drasgow, & Waldo, 1999/this issue), terminology is not clear in this area. Harassers seems to suggest that all incidents can be classified as harassing in a psychological sense, and perpetrators connotes more severity than may be the case. Thus, offenders, although still less than perfect, is used to describe persons who are identified as the sources of targets’ experiences.