The culture of silence that allows sexual harassment in the workplace to continue

The #MeToo movement has led to women the world over coming forward with stories of harassment. This issue is not confined to a single company or industry. It is an endemic problem which spreads far beyond the cases of sexual abuse that hit the headlines sporadically. In my research, I have spoken to women in many industries who have suffered some form of sex-based harassment in the workplace – from sectors that are much more male-dominated like engineering to more supposedly “enlightened” environments such as academia. Sex-based harassment includes sexual harassment, but also encompasses other forms of behaviour that demean or humiliate someone on the basis of their sex, such as sexist remarks, harassment during pregnancy and post birth and gender-based bullying. When studying the careers of British women engineers with Laurie Cohen from the University of Nottingham and Joanne Duberley from the University of Birmingham, we found that women in this industry regularly encountered harassment on the basis of their sex