A sexual harassment survey of 600 men

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/28/upshot/sexual-harassment-survey-600-men.html

by tysone • 9 years ago

30 32 9 years ago

I'm surprised "Jokes or stories" and "Sexual remarks" had a similar proportion.

jhiska3• 9 years ago

Self-reported. Not a random population. The numbers are higher because most men (the ones who refused to take part) are intelligent enough to not denounce themselves to the NYT for serious sexual offences. Not reliable, and may do more harm than good, because it maximizes minor harassment, but minimizes the numbers of serious harassment.

grenoire• 9 years ago

Sometimes you cannot get better data. Insights provided from self-reported studies are not necessarily externally valid, yet they are valuable nevertheless.

jhiska3• 9 years ago

There are decades of research studies on this topic in criminology alone that the NYT can tap into. Look up the field of "victimology".

On the other hand, the NYT is not a scientific journal. Supposedly, they know what makes people interested in a topic. They want to start a public conversation, and while that's innocent and beneficial enough, they're starting the conversation on the wrong foot, and commentators like me end up having to talk about what I talked instead.

It would also be interesting if they brought up women-on-men harassment figures, if only to point that the numbers are so much lower, and other data that suggests that this might be indicative of cultural differences between how men and women in the West are raised (and not some innate male proclivity to harass that supposedly has to be socially repressed).

trentmb• 9 years ago

are valuable nevertheless

... or incredibly harmful.

vectorEQ• 9 years ago

how people waste their time. imagine someone thought this was a sound idea to do it like this >.> and approved it for a big media outlet. this is like those "science proves cats are nice because 20 people like cats" articles >.<

soyiuz4• 9 years ago

Do you think shedding light on harassment is a waste of time? It is a relatively large sample size and the problems with methodology are addressed. What do you suggest is a better use of the paper's time in regards to the spate of recent news about sexual harassment in the workplace?

forinti• 9 years ago

At least you get people to think about their behaviour.

thinkMOAR• 9 years ago

Only thing nytimes.com links get me to think about, is how much i hate paywalled links on HN.

sevensor2• 9 years ago

Furthermore, the correlation with Trump approval is totally fishy. These numbers don't rule out the possibility that men harass women at roughly the same rates regardless, and self-report differently due to their awareness of the issue.

sidlls• 9 years ago

Why is it fishy? I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think it's great to see an acknowledgement that there is a potential relationship to the brazenness of serial harrassers to the fact that someone on tape admitting to sexual assault (what Trump's "locker room talk" describes is not mere harassment) is President.

soyiuz4• 9 years ago

It makes sense that those who condone harassment would support others who harass, or at least tend not to see other harassers in a negative light?

Self-reporting bias would certainly have some effect, but not as much as brute similarity of worldviews regarding women, gender, sex, workplace etc. Like attracts like. Nothing fishy about that.

jhiska3• 9 years ago

It's a politically-charged selection from the data and was quoted out of full context on a non-scientific, mass-appeal paper.

A lot of things are possible. Maybe Trump supporters are more likely to harass or maybe they surprisingly aren't; the most dangerously effective misogynist is one that adopts the language of political correctness but not the beliefs. This requires further study.

te_chris• 9 years ago

They acknowledge all of the methodological stuff towards the end. The NYT itself didn't conduct the research and they compared to the results of similar surveys and it was consistent. How desperate are some people to minimise this stuff?

IronKettle• 9 years ago

Well, except all the similar surveys were also self-reported as far as I can tell.

It's worth noting the social desirability bias here. It's likely the problem is actually much worse than the study indicates.

weberc22• 9 years ago

A lot of people are legitimately skeptical of the Times and other outlets reporting on social/political topics. Both the social sciences and journalists skew hard to the left, so content like this is very often biased (and incorrect as a result). Skepticism seems like a valid response; arguably more so than blind faith.

soyiuz4• 9 years ago

Self-reported data is better than no data, as long as the nature of the sample bias is clear (which in this case it is).

awinder• 9 years ago

this comment is completely unsourced, proposes illogical conclusions (numbers are higher because people can’t lie to the NYT on a survey response?), and then makes a wild claim about how a survey article is going to cause societal damage.

This comment is not HN caliber and a lot of you know this and still upvoted. I sincerely hope some of you grow up or find a new community to trash in 2018.

zython• 9 years ago

Well its a start. No need to be so harsh. It's a serious issue and I think the more and the better we report on it, the effects will only be beneficial.

weberc22• 9 years ago

It's unfortunate that the most prominent behaviors are characterized so vaguely. It seems that "could be considered offensive by some" is an extremely broad criteria that is likely to be padded with benign behaviors, especially given that these categories are each about 4X the size of the others, and the variance is otherwise quite low. Given that, I wonder what the aggregates look like after throwing these categories out? What percent of men engaged in any of the remaining categories? How are offenders distributed across blue/white collar jobs, etc.?

ameister142• 9 years ago

This is a bit ridiculous, as the questions aren't specific. For example, I've definitely said something some people might consider offensive at work in the past year, but it wasn't sexist and it was in context. According to this, I would be categorized into 'made sexist remarks' regardless.

If you send a friend a direct message on slack with a comic that other people might find offensive, or reference something that they did the night or week before, would that fall into multiple categories?

I've designed surveys before and been trained to do so in a way that limits inherent bias. This doesn't seem to be a well thought out or designed survey set. Also, what is a SQL server reporting system doing asking people about sexual harassment?

ScottAS2• 9 years ago

100% agree. Some of the questions are ambiguously worded but the results are displayed through the lens of sexism.

parenthephobia• 9 years ago

This is a bit ridiculous, as the questions aren't specific.

The issue is the editorialising the results, and not providing the other questions they asked, the actual results, or a more detailed description of the methodology.

If they did that we could ignore the article and potentially discovery something useful in the results.

Also, what is a SQL server reporting system doing asking people about sexual harassment?

That's gone over my head.

ameister142• 9 years ago

at the bottom, the small print says the survey is from SSRS

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

Was expecting a survey of men who had been sexually harassed at work.

soyiuz4• 9 years ago

Bottom line: besides being unethical, harassment at work results in a less competitive labor market (a huge percentage of talent opts out of the industry), a less productive workplace, and shoddier products (lack of diversity mirrors the lack of customer engagement). This is to say that doing the right thing is also good for business.

ScottAS2• 9 years ago

Interesting survey, but it seems very disingenuous that the researchers have lumped in "objectionable behaviour" with "sexual harassment". These sets do not have that much overlap.

"About a third of men said they had done something at work within the past year that would qualify as objectionable behavior or sexual harassment"

Objectionable behaviour: doing something your boss doesn't like, breaking process, even being an outspoken feminist could be considered objectionable behaviour. If you have not completed one "objectionable" action in a year you must be a robot.

"Made remarks that some might consider sexist or offensive?" - There are so many acceptable remarks that some might consider "offensive". Eg. "God is not real".

Seems like bad research to lump these sets together and then present it strictly as a survey on sexual harassment.

randyrand• 9 years ago

Notice nearly all of these end with "which might offend someone."

Is that really how we draw the line? Someone, anyone just has to be offended?

I think we really need to reevaluate sexual harassment law and culture.

smsm42• 9 years ago

What is bothering me here is "some might consider". I know for a fact some consider picture of a frog or milk to be a racist symbol (sad, but true). I know that calling oneself handsome can be construed sexual misconduct[1], what if I have done that? Another things that "some" think are sexual misconduct or sexist: compliments & drink invitations [2], fitting clothes[3], "ladies and gentlemen" [4], accidentally misspelling somebody's name [5], prioritizing facts over opinion [6], talking about sandwiches [7], using word "genius"[8]. True, some of these examples border on the insane, and some are opinions of a tiny minority that are clearly offense mining and oversensitive. But the questionnaire doesn't have any allowance for that - if I know some might consider using the word genius sexist, and I said that word, if I am a honest person, I have to report "yes" to that question, and forever enter the official scientific statistics as a sexual harasser. I think there's something wrong with that.

[1] http://thetab.com/us/columbia/2016/10/01/i-was-reported-for-...

[2] https://www.dailywire.com/news/23852/study-lot-young-people-...

[3] https://www.truthrevolt.org/news/university-oregon-appropria...

[4] https://www.dailywire.com/news/18600/london-tube-just-banned...

[5] http://reason.com/blog/2016/10/04/u-tennessee-student-accuse...

[6] https://mobile.twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/77849809757...

[7] https://www.dailywire.com/news/22084/australian-feminists-lo...

[8] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/c...

A sexual harassment survey of 600 men

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