Are Universities Enabling Sexual Harassment and Assault?

Adia Harvey Wingfield pens an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed.

"Over the last year, several news stories have surfaced describing allegations of sexual assault against professors. While the details varied, the general outlines of the stories were pretty much the same: women who were graduate students or junior faculty accused tenured male faculty members of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault. In response, departments and administrators often offered light punishments and made little effort to establish that their departments and universities were not places where the types of sexual violence described could occur with impunity.

Sexual assault and harassment are not limited to academic settings. But there are aspects of the university structure that make it too easy for those in powerful positions to abuse their status and engage in harassment and assault against less powerful groups (including, but not limited to, women).

In 1990, the late sociologist Joan Acker published a study that introduced the concept of the gendered organization. Acker argued that while we might think of bureaucracies as neutral, objective, impersonal institutions, they are actually gendered in ways that have serious implications for those working within them. Specifically, she contended that gendered organizations are structured in ways that privilege and advantage men through social processes including hiring, job expectations, culture and rewards.

According to Acker, this also shapes the ways that occupations are structured, such that organizational processes cast certain jobs as better suited for men or for women, and dictate job expectations and rewards accordingly. Acker’s framework has been widely used among sociologists and other social scientists, as this approach pushes us to think less about individual behavior and more about how gender inequality can actually be embedded in organizations’ basic functions."

Read more in Inside Higher Ed. 

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