Monitoring Harassment in Organizatins
Ada Gonzalez-Torres (Ben-Gurion University and Harvard University); Laura Boudreau (Columbia University); Sylvain Chassang (Princeton University); Rachel Heath (University of Washington)
Abstract
We experimentally evaluate secure survey methods for monitoring harassment in organizations. We partner with a Bangladeshi garment manufacturer and survey its workers. ``Hard garbling'' responses to sensitive questions, i.e., automatically recording a random subset as complaints, increases reporting of physical harassment by 290%, sexual harassment by 271%, and threatening behavior by 45%, from rates of 1.5%, 1.8%, and 9.9% under direct elicitation. Rapport-building and removing team identifiers do not increase reporting. We show that garbled reports can be used to consistently estimate policy-relevant statistics of reported harassment. In our data, harassment is widespread, most managers partake, and victims are isolated.