The Changing Nature of Employment-Related Sexual Harassment: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Government (1978-1994)

Abstract

This paper examines the changing nature of views towards and reports of sexual harassmentusing unique data drawn from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board (USMSPB) of theU.S. Federal Government over the period from 1978-1994. Our results indicate that whilefederal government employees reported only slightly more incidents of employment-relatedunwanted sexual behavior in 1994 than in 1978, the willingness to define unwanted sexualbehavior as sexual harassment increased dramatically over this period. The increasedwillingness of federal government employees to label certain behaviors as sexualharassment does not appear to be driven by changes in the demographic, human capital andjob characteristics of federal government employees, rather the changes appear to be due tostructural changes in views (conditional on characteristics) of what constitutes sexualharassment. At the same time, more of the change in the incidence of unwanted sexualbehavior on the job itself seems to be explained by changes in human capital and jobcharacteristics. Finally, we find that the qualitative nature of harassment in public-sectoremployment has changed despite the fact that the incidence of unwanted sexual behaviorwas relatively constant between 1978 and 1994.

Keywords: public-sector employment, sexual harassment

JEL Classification: J16, J28