Rachel Heath

joint seminars
amse seminar
Development and political economy seminar

Rachel Heath

University of Washington
Monitoring Harassment in Organizations
Joint with
Laura Boudreau, Sylvain Chassang, Ada González-Torres
Venue

IBD Amphi

Îlot Bernard du Bois - Amphithéâtre

AMU - AMSE
5-9 boulevard Maurice Bourdet
13001 Marseille

Date(s)
Monday, December 4 2023| 11:30am to 12:45pm
Contact(s)

Nicolas Clootens: nicolas.clootens[at]univ-amu.fr
Timothée Demont: timothee.demont[at]univ-amu.fr
Habiba Djebbari: habiba.djebbari[at]univ-amu.fr
Romain Ferrali: romain.ferrali[at]univ-amu.fr

Abstract

We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? How isolated are its victims? To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manufacturer to experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. Garbling responses to sensitive questions by automatically recording a random subset as complaints increases reporting of physical harassment by 288%, sexual harassment by 269%, and threatening behavior by 46%, from reporting rates of 1.5%, 1.8%, and 9.9%, respectively, under the status quo of direct elicitation. A rapport-building treatment has an insignificant aggregate effect, but may affect men and women differently. Removing team identifiers from survey responses does not significantly increase reporting and prevents the computation of policy-relevant team-level statistics. The resulting data shows that harassment is widespread, that the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and that victims are often isolated in teams.