Vi blev antagligen för många : Könskränkande behandling i akademisk miljö

The aim of this study is to further the theoretical understanding of gender harassment. I suggest an approach and a theoretical model that answers the question of how to understand and describe gender harassment both in terms of specific actions taken against an individual because of gender and the combined actions that constitute a gender harassment process. Due to the fact that gender harassment takes place in a structure and that the perpetrator needs structural support to be able to harass, the model considers existing power relationships at the workplace, i.e. how gender harassment reflects the distribution of power and structural behaviour of men and women. As my empirical material indicate aggressive behaviour and fear it is crucial to raise the issue of violence and to consider to what extent gender harassment is expressed av violence in the workplace. The empirical material contains broad-based and in-depth narratives about a kind of situation that is not well defined in the extant literature or elsewhere. It is essentially unknown whether gender harassment takes place to the same extent as sexual harassment. Even though quite a few narratives about daily working life bear witness of such situations they have remained largely undefined and little understood. In the present study, a combination of feministic organization theory about powerstructures at the workplace and violence theory is used to broaden the picture and to develop an instrument for understanding narratives about gender harassment. The results from the analysis, drawing upon material from practical gender equality work at a university and four in-depth interviews with victims of gender harassment, suggest that a combination of feministic organization theory and violence theory is fruitful for understanding the phenomenon of gender harassment. It is suggested that the proposed theoretical model offers a first but important step towards identifying and preventing gender harassment at the workplace.