Your Career: Female bosses and harassment

msnbc.com
Women in positions of power targeted more often than the rank-and-file
By Eve Tahmincioglu
msnbc.com contributor
updated 12:23 p.m. ET, Mon., Aug 24, 2009

Ellen worked in the male-dominated world of television ad sales for a decade without experiencing much sexual harassment. But things changed when she started to climb the ladder.
Ellen, who lives in San Francisco but did not want her full name used, says her male colleagues and even her superiors started talking about their sexual experiences in graphic detail when she was around and made lewd comments that made her uncomfortable enough to complain to her human resource department.
“I was being harassed. I was being undermined,” she explains. “I think they were intimidated by me, and this was the only way to get power back.”
Thomasina Tafur, who runs a consulting firm in Memphis, Tenn., experienced a similar phenomenon when she rose up the corporate ranks at a major transportation company. One colleague would make over-the-top comments in a room full of managers about how good she looked.
“The higher you were, the more of a power trip it became for men, and sometimes I thought they were not even aware of what they said,” she says.
Female managers are 137 percent more likely to experience sexual harassment than their rank-and-file counterparts, according to a recently released study.
Even Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the primary investigator on the study, was surprised by the findings.
“It’s sort of a paradox,” she says. “You would expect that having that status and power over other employees would protect you from that behavior.”
Turns out it doesn’t, and McLaughlin’s conclusion is that “because of gender norms, people are still not accepting women in power positions.”
The report, “A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Power and Sexual Harassment in Young Adulthood,” looked at data that tracked nearly 600 individuals from adolescents into their 30s.
Undermining authority
The women in the study reported that men were not sexually harassing them because they wanted a relationship with them, McLaughlin says. “It was more about proving themselves,” she says about the harassers.

Full Story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32476564/ns/business-careers