Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, although it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. Popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, but power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets. This article analyzes longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews from the Youth Development Study to test this idea and to delineate why and how supervisory authority, gender nonconformity, and workplace sex ratios affect harassment. Relative to nonsupervisors, female supervisors are more likely to report harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can serve as an equalizer against women in power, motivated more by control and domination than by sexual desire. Interviews point to social isolation as a mechanism linking harassment to gender nonconformity and women’s authority, particularly in male-dominated work settings.

Many working women will experience sexual harassment at some point in their careers. While some report this harassment, many leave their jobs to escape the harassing environment. This mixed-methods study examines whether sexual harassment and subsequent career disruption affect women’s careers. Using in-depth interviews and longitudinal survey data from the Youth Development Study, we examine the effect of sexual harassment for women in the early career. We find that sexual harassment increases financial stress, largely by precipitating job change, and can significantly alter women’s career attainment.

Studies of legal mobilization often focus on people who have perceived some wrong, but rarely consider the process that selects them into the pool of potential "mobilizers." Similarly, studies of victimization or targeting rarely go on to consider what people do about the wrong, or why some targets come forward and others remain silent. We here integrate sociolegal, feminist, and criminological theories in a conceptual model that treats experiencing sexual harassment and mobilizing in response to it as interrelated processes. We then link these two processes by modeling them as jointly determined outcomes and examine their connections using interviews with a subset of our survey respondents. Our results suggest that targets of harassment are selected, in part, because they are least likely to tell others about the experience. Strategies that workers employ to cope with and confront harassment are also discussed. We find that traditional formal/informal dichotomies of mobilization responses may not fully account for the range of ways individuals respond to harassment, and we propose a preliminary typology of responses.How do individuals respond when they feel their rights have been violated? Do those who perceive a wrong simply tell the wrong-doer, do they tell others, or do they ignore it? Following Ewick and Silbey's (1998) groundbreaking work on the common place of law, a growing body of literature has taken up these and related questions of legal consciousness and mobilization (e.g., Albiston 2005;Connolly 2002;Fleury-Steiner 2003;Hoffman 2005;Litowitz 2000;Lovell 2006;Marshall 2005; Marshall and Barclay 2003;Richman 2001). Central to these studies are the interrelated processes by which individuals first come to experience or perceive some wrong and then do something about it. In this study of sexual harassment, we attempt to link these two processes -in this case, subjectively experiencing sexual harassment and then going on to tell a supervisor or government agency that it has occurred. We also examine how individuals respond to harassment and why they employ particular response strategies. We find multidimensional responses to harassment, such that traditional formal/informal dichotomies may not adequately account for diversity of strategies that individuals employ. We therefore propose a preliminary multidimensional typology of mobilization responses.We first describe legal consciousness, targeting, and mobilization within the context of sexual harassment. Next we outline a general model of sexual harassment and legal mobilization based * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 meetings of the Law and Society Association, Pittsburgh. We thank Jeylan Mortimer for support in several phases of this research, Jason Houle for research assistance, and Steve Barkan, Lance Blackstone, Steve Cohn, Andy Halpern-Manners, Mike Vuolo, and Sara Wakefield for helpful comments.Direct correspondence to Amy Blackstone, Department of Sociology, University of Maine, 5728 Fernald Hall, Orono, ME 04...

Recent scholarship and public discourse highlight an apparent waning of civic engagement in the United States. Although the welfare state is generally thought to support democracy by reducing economic inequality, it may paradoxically contribute to political disempowerment of some groups. We examine the effects of state interventions on civic participation among young adults, hypothesizing that involvement with stigmatizing social programs, such as welfare, reduces political engagement while receipt of non-stigmatizing government assistance does not dampen civic involvement. Using official voting records and survey data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of young adults, a series of regression models suggests that welfare recipients are less likely to vote than non-recipients, whereas recipients of non-means tested government assistance participate similarly to young adults who do not receive government help. These effects hold even when background factors, self-efficacy, and prior voting behavior are controlled. Welfare receipt is not associated, however, with suppressed participation in non-state arenas such as volunteer work. Intensive interviews with YDS welfare recipients are used to illustrate and develop the analysis.Over the past few decades, social science and public discussion have increasingly focused on changes in civic engagement and citizenship in the United States. Declining voter turnout rates, an increase in single-issue, self-interested politics, and a retreat from associational ties and community involvement, amongst other trends, have signaled to many the weakening of American democracy (Putnam 1995(Putnam , 2000Etzioni 1996; Bellah et al. 1985). Such concerns carry particular significance in the United States, where the strength of the nation and its democracy historically has been thought to rest in the active civic life of its citizenry (Tocqueville [1835(Tocqueville [ ] 1966.Compelling evidence suggests that the United States has witnessed a general decline in civic participation over the past few decades. Voter turnout rates have decreased from a high of 63 percent in the 1960 presidential election to a low of 49 percent in 1996 (U.S. Census Bureau 2008). Moreover, citizens have expressed higher rates of cynicism and disengagement from the political process, and appear to be retreating from shared public life and civic involvement NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript (Etzioni 1996;Putnam 1995Putnam , 2000. These trends are particularly disturbing among young Americans who have comparatively low voting rates and who may be establishing patterns that will persist into the future. Even with the recent rise from [2000][2001][2002][2003][2004], only 41 percent of 18-20 year olds and 42.5 percent of 21-24 year olds reported voting in the 2004 presidential election. Such changes have been viewed as posing a threat to the overall well-being of American society. Research suggests that civic engagement benefits socie...

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