PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify promising themes of the papers in the special issues of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion dedicated to advancing scholarship on sex-based harassment.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual overview of the research pertaining to these themes and an analysis of the special issues papers' contributions to these themes.FindingsFour themes that represent important but relatively neglected lines of inquiry into sex-based harassment are identified. These are (1) the psychology of harassment, (2) organizational culture and networks, (3) the invisible majority and (4) the importance of collective action.Originality/valueThe paper offers an expert perspective on the state of research related to sex-based harassment and four themes that are important to moving it forward.

Intersectional invisibility is a salient experience for women of color in the workplace and stems from their nonprototypicality in gender and race. We expand research and theory on intersectional invisibility to propose that women of color vary in their degrees of nonprototypicality, and thus in their social power and their experiences of and responses to invisibility at work. We present an inductive interview study of a diverse sample of 65 women of color in the United States and Canada, who work in traditionally white and male professions. We examined how differences in race, immigration status, age, and organizational rank informed the types of invisibility they experienced and their responses to invisibility. Four forms of invisibility (erasure, homogenization, exoticization, and whitening) and three response pathways (withdrawal, approach, and pragmatism) emerged from our findings that differed according to women of color’s social power. Women with less social power experienced the most invisibility and were more likely to engage in withdrawal tactics that intensified their invisibility and marginalization at work. Women with more social power experienced less invisibility and were more likely to engage in approach tactics that risked backlash. Women who understood their invisibility to be rooted in structural causes responded more pragmatically to invisibility, occasionally engaging in radical honesty to connect with others who treated them as invisible and to change their behavior. We discuss the implications of our research for intersectionality theory, directions for future research, and organizational practice.

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