‘Playing the Game?’: The sexual harassment of female social workers across professional workspaces

Abstract

Prompted by an experience while on a student placement in the United States, where sexual harassment was not responded to appropriately in professional supervision, the article focuses on female practitioners’ accounts of such harassment. Initially, the wider context for sexual harassment is furnished by a brief overview of the definition of sexual harassment, the legal context and responses in the Republic of Ireland. The focus then shifts to a small-scale empirical project garnering perceptions. The study is clearly preliminary and tentative, yet it illuminates important findings relating to the sexual harassment of female social workers across professional workspaces.

Barriers to the C-Suite: The Impact of Perceptions of Gender Bias on Women Leaders’ Senior Leadership Ambitions

“…For sexual harassment, the skewness score of 4.08 (SE = .13) and kurtosis score of 18.94 (SE = .26) indicate that this variable was indeed skewed. While floor effects are common in the workplace sexual harassment literature (e.g.,O'Reilly & Garrett, 2019;Zhu, Lyu, & Ye, 2019), this variable was extremely skewed, and as a result, was not included in subsequent analyses.…”