Sex-based harassment and organizational silencing: How women are led to reluctant acquiescence in academia
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The #MeToo and the Time’s Up movements have raised the issue of sexual harassment encountered by women to the level of public consciousness. Together, these movements have captured not only the ubiquity of sexual harassment in the everyday functioning of the workplace, but they have also demonstrated how women are silenced about their experiences of it. Inspired by the political and the social currents emerging from these movements, and theoretically informed by ideas of discursive hegemony, rhetorical persuasion and affective practice, this article draws on a qualitative study of early- and mid-career female academics in business schools to answer the following question: How are victims who start to voice their experiences of sex-based harassment silenced within the workplace? Our findings reveal that organizational silence is the product of various third-party actors (e.g. line managers, HR, colleagues) who mobilize myriad discourses to persuade victims not to voice their discontent. We develop the concept of ‘reluctant acquiescence’ to explain the victims’ response to organizational silencing. In terms of its contributions to the extant literature, this article: (i) moves away from explanations of sex-based harassment that focus solely (or predominately) on the actions of individual perpetrators; and (ii) shows how reluctant acquiescence leads to maintaining the status quo in the organization. In highlighting features of academic work that facilitate reluctant acquiescence, we call for more contextualization of the dynamics of sex-based harassment specifically, and other forms of workplace mistreatment broadly.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it