40 Years Later, Redbook's Survey Results on Workplace Sexual Harassment are Basically the Same

We would maybe like to think of the 1970s as a troubled but also bygone era as it applies the struggles of women attempting to achieve workplace parity. Four decades, presumably, is a lot of time in which to progress. The 2010s may not the Good Girls Revolt era, and women don't have to resort to measures like suing publications in order to get the reporting roles for which they are qualified, but sexual harassment in the workplace, as Redbook discovered, remains perniciously persistent. In 1976, Redbook conducted a survey on workplace sexual harassment, called Sex on the Job, in the form of a tear-out in the magazine that women could fill out and mail back in. "The survey," write Ashley Mateo and Kaitlin Menza, "was a landmark moment in the study of sexual harassment; it's since been cited in hundreds of academic articles." The 2016 follow-up that asked the same questions as the original was, naturally, a digital survey, but in an interesting side note, the more cumbersome OG version received 9,000 responses, while the contemporary digital version got just 500. The basis of comparison may be a bit uneven, but the results are still very similar, and they are that the ass grabs, leering and general male-gaze discomfort of the past century are a problem for this one as well. In terms of the overarching question of whether women saw workplace sexual harassment as a problem, 92 percent of the 1976 recipients agreed, compared to 99 percent today. As the writers point out, there's plenty of high-profile examples just in the media world alone (see: Ailes, Roger) to contextualize the figures, and plenty outside of it as well. Redbook's respondents did some contextualizing of their own: Many women, like Victoria, 29, have experienced several of those behaviors at once. "I work on a TV set, and I'm often dressed in functional clothing — jeans, sneakers, a sweater. But one day, I was wearing a top that wasn't long enough to cover my butt in the back," she says. "A male crew member — whom I work with every day — came up to me, grabbed my arm, leaned into my ear and said, 'You're lookin' good in those jeans. You really know how to wear 'em.' I didn't know how to respond, so I just walked away." Read the whole piece here.