In a Day's Work Read online

  Malamuth says that, taken as a whole, his research has shown that male attraction to sexual violence is more common than most people had previously realized. “Aggression against women is not the product of a sick, abnormal man,” Malamuth says. “The potential for it is embedded in the culture. Culture can affect it, if they are given permission.”

  Malamuth’s work is what paved the way for similar research on workplace sexual harassment. In the late 1980s, at about the same time Louise Fitzgerald was testing the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire on women, a psychologist at Illinois State University named John B. Pryor began to adapt Malamuth’s ideas about the likelihood to rape to concepts of sexual harassment.

  Pryor focused on the more extreme and coercive types of sexual harassment in the workplace, such as quid pro quo harassment. Borrowing from Malamuth, Pryor developed a Likelihood to Sexually Harass scale by asking men how likely they were to engage in a series of ten hypothetical scenarios if they were assured that there would be no consequences for their actions.27 One question, for example, asked whether the participant would give a woman a promotion in exchange for sexual favors if they knew they would never get caught.

  The study participants were then given additional surveys, including the sexual aggression questionnaires that Malamuth had designed to examine men’s likelihood to rape. Finally, they were asked to participate in an exercise that would test their treatment of women.

  Taking these things together, Pryor found that those who were likely to sexually harass tended to hold adversarial sexual beliefs, to have higher rape proclivities, to find it hard to see other people’s points of view, to be more authoritarian, and to subscribe to rigid sex roles. The Likelihood to Sexually Harass scale, known as the LSH, has since been widely adopted and translated into various languages for use in other countries.

  Pryor says that the research into men who are likely to sexually harass reveals that “sex and power are cognitively connected in the minds of people who are likely to commit sexually coercive acts by their own admission.”

  As a result, certain jobs and work environments are particularly conducive to creating the kind of power imbalances that make undocumented workers easy targets, he says. “Immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, have a long history of being in the situation where they are being extorted by employers, sometimes sexually,” Pryor says.

  Through the academic research, a possible solution began to emerge. In the early 1990s, a few years after Pryor piloted the LSH, one of Pryor’s graduate students, Christine La Vite, conducted a pivotal study.28 She assigned men who had scored both high and low on the LSH to participate in one of two staged scenarios in the lab: one in which an authority figure pretended to sexually harass a trainee and another in which the authority figure acted professionally toward a trainee. The participant was then asked to take over the training, and his behavior was observed.

  The experiment produced an interesting discovery. The men who had scored high on the LSH were more likely to harass if the person demonstrating the training portion of the study had engaged in sexual harassment himself. The opposite was also true, however. Men who were inclined to sexually harass did less of it when the supervisor had acted professionally. “What it showed was that local norms as conveyed by a person in authority are important,” Pryor says.

  This finding has been replicated in additional research by Pryor. In one study from the mid-1990s, Pryor and his colleagues analyzed large-scale Department of Defense survey data.29 They looked at the reports from the study participants in various offices of the department about whether or not they thought the local leadership was tolerant of sexual harassment. Then they examined the responses from the same offices about their experiences with sexual harassment. The study once again found that authority figures were influential. In the offices where workers reported high tolerance for sexual harassment, they also reported higher rates of experiencing it.

  In another study, Pryor and his colleagues examined how social norms of groups can affect sexual harassment.30 He recruited students and measured their LSH before bringing them into a laboratory setting. He put the participants into groups of three men based on their LSH scores. Three men who scored high on the scale were grouped together and three men with low scores were put together. Then Pryor gave the students a cover story. They were told that they were going to do a trust exercise by leading a blind-folded woman—a confederate who was also a researcher—around a maze. Each person in the group would take a turn as the leader.

  “What we found was, of course, that the groups of men who were high on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass scale, in general, did more inappropriate touching then men who were low, who didn’t do it all,” Pryor says. Among the men who were likely to harass, Pryor also noticed a “cascading phenomenon.” If the first person did something inappropriate, then it increased the likelihood that the second person would, too. If the first two behaved badly, then the third was very likely to, as well.

  “My interpretation was that we were seeing the development of something analogous to local social norms,” Pryor says. “People are influenced by what other people are doing.”

  These findings can have real-world application to the workplace and an actual effect on the prevalence of sexual harassment, he says. Sexual harassment can effectively be “short-circuited if someone in a leadership position says, ‘This is not going to be tolerated,’” he says. “But often you have the development of norms from the ground up where you put together a bunch of guys who want to do this kind of thing and they will encourage each other.”

  Sexual harassment in many ways, then, is situational. “People who are likely to sexually harass are less likely to perform those behaviors in circumstances where there is a strong social pressure not to do it,” Pryor says.

  “Social pressure is a powerful force,” he adds. “As human beings, our instincts are to go along with what others are doing. Sexual harassment is something that most people know that they shouldn’t be doing, so it’s about reinforcing that by creating social norms that say that this is not what you should be doing.”

  Though they had started on opposite sides of the question, Louise Fitzgerald and her colleagues looking at the problem from the victim’s point of view had arrived at the same conclusion. In research that studied the “organizational factors” that led to sexual harassment, they found that work environment and the attitudes of their superiors had great impact.31

  “That’s one of the things we do know: If a company sends a strong message that it does not tolerate this behavior, there will be less sexual harassment,” Fitzgerald says. “Some people will still act out, but there will be a lot less of it.”

  A formidable body of research has drawn similar conclusions, but even as it creates a path toward prevention, sexual harassment hasn’t gone away. About 6,800 people reported being sexually harassed in the workplace to the federal government in 2016, and an unknown number experience it without ever saying a word about it.32

  In other words, as a society, we have long known how to minimize sexual harassment. We have just not yet decided to do it.

  6

  The Ways Forward

  It was a muggy May morning in 2016 when about fifty farmworkers, almost a dozen of them women, emerged from a retired school bus and shuffled into the hiring office of Pacific Tomato Growers in Palmetto, Florida. They had come directly from the fields, still wearing shade-bearing hats and bandanas, their sleeves freshly tinted a lime green from pulling the fruit from its leafy plants. Their shoes tracked a trail of dirt onto the industrial carpeting as they filed in to take seats in plastic chairs.

  Angel García, the farm’s upbeat human resources manager, stood near the door and greeted each attendee as if he were the host of a party. He shook hands, smiled broadly, and called out some longtime workers by name.

  After everyone had sunk into their chairs, García set the stage. The workers were there for a new training program on workplace vi
olence, he said. They were there to learn how to identify and report sexual harassment in the fields, and they would also get information about what to do if they or their coworkers were in abusive relationships.

  “We started developing a training for farmworkers a long time ago as a way for them to understand harassment and violence in the workplace,” García told the group in both Spanish and English. For the next half hour, he said, the group would watch three short videos, and after each one, they would discuss what they had seen. He paused patiently between phrases as his words were translated into Creole for the Haitian workers in the crowd.

  There was nothing particularly complicated about the training that García had described, and yet the fact that it was happening at all was revolutionary.

  Workplace violence training for workers isn’t common and is even more unusual when sexual violence and domestic violence are included in the conversation. What’s more, in an industry where human resources departments are a rarity and the timing of production dictates everything, every one of the thousand workers at Pacific Tomato Growers Farm #1 was receiving workplace sexual violence training that week on company time in the middle of the harvest.

  The training itself was novel because it wasn’t a corporate training program that had been dubbed into Spanish and Creole. Instead, it had been designed by farmworkers for farmworkers with the goal of making it accessible in language and content for people who might be unaware that there were laws prohibiting sexual harassment, and who might not know what their options were if they were a victim of sexual assault or domestic abuse themselves.

  This was a conscious decision by the group that had crafted the training, a collaboration among Florida farmworker advocacy organizations, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Fair Food Standards Council; employers, like Pacific Tomato; and Vida Legal Assistance, which is dedicated to assisting immigrant survivors of violence. These groups had been brought together by Futures Without Violence, an organization that has worked to counter gender-based violence for more than thirty years. In 2014, Futures Without Violence launched its Low Wage, High Risk project to address gender-based violence among vulnerable workers in three sites and industries scattered across the country. Pacific Tomato Growers Farm #1 was one of them. In all three, the goal was to generate new approaches tailored to each industry.

  “We want the workers to identify with the type of violence they are likely to see,” says Ana Vallejo of Vida Legal Assistance. “The behavior is the same anywhere, but it looks different in the fields and the expression of it is different. Here, workers can see domestic violence and sexual violence examples that they can relate to.”

  Back in the hiring office, the lights faded. The first video featured a worker named Alicia, whose supervisor had tried to grab her in his truck and had stalked her outside of work. Alicia confided in a co-worker as she sat at a company lunch table, and she said she was afraid to report her supervisor’s behavior because she didn’t want to lose her job. Her co-worker showed her a list of phone numbers she could call to get help and assured Alicia that she had the right to make a complaint. The call could even be confidential if she liked.

  Upbeat panpipe music closed out the scene, a signal that the first segment had come to a close. In the Pacific Tomato hiring office, the lights came back on. A human resources representative from the farm named Jessica Abrigo stood in front of the group. “Who can tell me in which ways the supervisor was inappropriate toward Alicia?” she asked.

  The question was met with a few seconds of silence. Abrigo asked the question a different way: “What were the things that made Alicia worried about her supervisor?”

  A male worker volunteered in Spanish that Alicia was afraid that the supervisor would fire her, which inspired one of the women in a pink baseball cap to jump in to concur. Their responses were translated from Spanish to English to Creole, which prompted a man wearing a black Superman cap to ask in Creole, “If this were to happen, what office would they go to? Because they are scared of the supervisor. He’s the problem.”

  “This is a very good question,” said García, the gregarious human resources rep. “We are going to clarify very quickly the levels of authority. If you go through that chain of command, everyone has the ability to address a problem with the person underneath them.”

  One of the collaborators in the training, Lindsay Adams, added that in addition to calling the company, they could also call her organization’s twenty-four-hour confidential hotline. Workers have a right to complain, and the company cannot fire them for reporting a problem, said Adams, who is an inspector with the Fair Food Standards Council, a workers’ rights organization.

  “Your question was awesome,” García told the worker in English. It was immediately translated into Creole and Spanish.

  The lights dimmed again, and next came a video segment about a woman living in the company’s farmworker housing with a verbally and physically abusive husband. When the clip had ended, the workers were led through another discussion. They were asked to think about the damaging effects of controlling and violent relationships, including their effects on the victims at work. The group was told that the company had developed a policy on domestic violence so workers can also go to the company for help.

  The final segment tackled verbal sexual harassment. It began in the tomato fields with a woman walking past a worker named César. “Sexy mama!” he called out to her. “All those curves and me with no brakes! I’d love to take her home and have her make me tortillas.”

  The crowd had watched the first two segments in rapt silence but this exchange elicited chortles and giggles. It was all a little too real.

  In the video, a coworker steps in and tells César to be respectful of the women he works with, but César is dismissive. “You have to show the woman who’s the man,” he replied. César’s co-worker doesn’t give him a pass but instead asks César if he would want his mother or sister treated the same way. The exchange gets César thinking and later, when other men catcall female workers, he can be seen moving along with his work without joining in.

  When the lights came back on, the group was still laughing and shaking their heads. Julia de la Cruz, an organizer with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, stood before the group to lead the discussion. A former farmworker, she had helped write the script and had acted the role of Alicia in the first segment. She had seen for herself what happens in the fields. “Everyone was laughing,” she observed. “Is this something you see or not?”

  With her question, the laughter fell off a cliff into a heavy silence. “If you see something like this, you shouldn’t have fear speaking up,” de la Cruz continued. “You should help out the other female workers. You should speak up; you shouldn’t be afraid.”

  García picked up on an unspoken cue and returned to stand before the group. He had a tough question for the crowd: This is a problem not just for women but also for men, so why don’t men say something to other men when they hear talk like this?

  No answer.

  García filled the silence by saying, “We are creating a culture of respect and one part of that is to challenge males to talk to other males.”

  The half hour was almost up. The workers were shown a list of phone numbers of organizations they could contact if they had a problem with sexual harassment or domestic violence. To conclude, Abrigo, the human resources staffer, asked the group if anyone had any final questions or comments.

  The worker in the Superman cap who had been the first to speak rose from his seat. In Creole, he said, “Thank you for thinking of us with this video, and for the different ways to contact you if we were to have a problem or situation, to maintain a safe place to work.”

  Then just as swiftly as they had filed in, the workers were up and lined up at the door. There was a boisterous shuffle back to the buses as the workers prepared to return to the blazing heat of the tomato fields.

  Over the course of a day and a half, the tomato pickers,
planters, and harvest dumpers from Pacific Tomato Growers Farm #1 were bused in from the fields or farm housing to the hiring office. Each group of fifty or sixty filed in and sat through the same thirty-minute presentation.

  In this way, the workers were shown how to identify the kinds of sexual harassment or domestic violence that they might actually see in their jobs. They were reminded of the resources available to them, and they were assured that no one could be fired for raising a problem with management.

  With the final group of Pacific Tomato workers, García put a fine point on the purpose of the training. “In two days, we trained the entire farm so we can change the culture,” he said. “So that nothing happens and if it does, you know you can report it. So that you say, ‘No, we will not be quiet.’ One person can make a difference.”

  The efforts at Pacific Tomato differed from most sexual harassment training programs because they weren’t happening in a vacuum. It followed an all-day training tailored for farm supervisors, focusing on specific scenarios that were likely to crop up in an agricultural setting. From there, the supervisors learned that it was part of their job to address the problem, and they were shown, step by step, what they could do to begin to resolve the issue.

  For some field-level supervisors, this was a revelation about their role in confronting sexual harassment. “There were supervisors that said, ‘I don’t want to get involved,’” says Laura Safer Espinoza, a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and the executive director of the Fair Food Standards Council, which collaborated in the training program. “And we started to make them understand that you are responsible for the work environment.”

  The training itself was not the solution, however, and training for training’s sake doesn’t seem to accomplish much. In 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which upholds the laws that protect workers from sexual harassment at work, convened a Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace. In an effort to find new strategies for tackling a longstanding problem, the group reviewed the research that evaluates sexual harassment training. It found that most of the existing studies have methodological deficiencies, but the handful of large-scale studies on the topic found that, while sexual harassment trainings can raise awareness, they don’t always change worker attitudes on the issue.1 One of these studies found that employees who had received training were more likely to report sexual harassment when the company communicates that it does not tolerate it. But when these researchers looked at whether training had an effect on the frequency of harassment that workers experienced, they found no evidence that it had.