Takin’ It To The Streets: An Examination Of Street Harassment’s Impact On Women’s Workplace Outcomes

Abstract

This thesis focuses on a critical yet understudied aspect of many working women’s lives within organizational research —street harassment—and how such experiences affect work outcomes for women. To address this overlooked experience, the researcher examines women’s perceptions of street harassment during their commutes to and from work and its effects on their occupational well-being (i.e., job satisfaction and work fatigue). She hypothesizes that more frequent experiences of street harassment during women’s commute to and from work predict lower occupational well-being and that this relationship is moderated by individual differences (e.g., race, attractiveness) of the harasser. To conduct this study, a sample of working women who commute to work by walking, cycling, or public transit in large urban areas at least three days a week were recruited to participate in a cross-sectional, online survey administered via Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). To test the hypotheses, she used hierarchical linear and moderated hierarchical regression analyses. Although there were significant correlations between street harassment and both work fatigue and job satisfaction, the effect of street harassment above and beyond workplace sexual harassment was significant for only work fatigue. Only two of the eight hypothesized moderated relationships were supported (i.e., race and attractiveness of the perpetrator moderated the effect of street harassment on job satisfaction). These findings contribute to our understanding of women’s lived experiences by identifying gender-related barriers and how they affect women’s work lives.