Have you ever wondered about the extent of sexual harassment of librarians in the workplace? On this show, Candice Benjes-Small, Head of Research at William & Mary Libraries, and Jennifer Resor-Whicker, University Librarian at Radford University, discuss their research on this topic. It’s a conversation that opens the door for broader work on what can be done to combat sexual harassment in our field.
Transcript
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This is Adriane Herrick
Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast, where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
Have you ever wondered about the extent of sexual harassment of librarians in the workplace? On this show, Candice Benjes-Small, Head of Research at William & Mary Libraries, and Jennifer Resor-Whicker, University Librarian at Radford University, discuss their research on this topic. It’s a conversation that opens the door for broader work on what can be done to combat sexual harassment in our field. Enjoy the show.
Candice and Jennifer, welcome to the show.
Candice Benjes-Small:
Hello
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
Hello
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Today we are examining the sexual harassment of librarians. As we start, will you share what you did to assess the prevalence of sexual harassment in the library field? Candice? 01:29
Candice Benjes-Small:
Back in 2017, when the #MetToo movement started, a conversation began on Facebook between Jennifer Knievel, who was a librarian at CU Boulder, Jennifer—my colleague here, and myself about the sexual harassment that happened in libraries. Lots of other librarians talked about having experienced sexual harassment in their careers, and we started to wonder whether there was any research out there to actually study how prevalent it was, and at that time there was not.
We began talking about doing a research project together. We were incredibly fortunate to have two sociology professors, Alison Wisecup and Joanna Hunter, agree to do the research with us. We used the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire to conduct our studies. This is the gold standard of sexual harassment tools that are out there. It has been used in multiple other industries besides libraries, and it measures prevalence. It just looks at the last five years, and it asks librarians whether they’ve experienced sexual harassment in that time period.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: What did your results reveal about sexual harassment in libraries? Jennifer? 02:51
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
I think we both went in knowing that sexual harassment was a problem in libraries, but the overall prevalence of it, I think, astonished even us. I don’t think we were expecting what we found. So, 77 percent of academic librarians and 89 percent of public librarians reported experiencing sexual harassment behaviors within the last five years. Numerous respondents told us—they contacted us, Well, if you go back even more, we could talk about even more experiences we had with sexual harassment.
The biggest surprise came when we looked at the difference between the number of people who reported being sexually harassed and the number of responses that reported at least one category. We’ll get into the SEQ a little bit more later about the different concepts that they use to describe sexual harassment, but when directly asked whether or not they had been sexually harassed at the end of the survey, only 32 percent of the public library respondents said yes. However, 89 percent of those respondents included at least one sexual harassment experience in their survey.
So, I think this just speaks to the widespread normalization and minimization of sexual harassment in our field. This also has been seen among, of course, academic librarians—that was the first survey we conducted—of academic librarians. For them, 77 percent responded yes to at least one dimension of sexual harassment within their survey, but at the end of the survey, when they asked if they were sexually harassed, only 17 percent said yes, that they had been sexually harassed. So again, that was just really surprising to us that there was that much discrepancy and that much, I guess, normalization of sexual harassment in librarianship.
When we did the public librarian survey, we did add one thing that we didn’t have with the academic, we added a comment box at the end, because a lot of academic librarians had contacted us and wanted to tell their stories. They wanted to talk about what they had experienced. So, we added this comment box at the end. It was optional. About 25 percent of the respondents did reply to it. Some wrote words of gratitude—they were thankful we were doing this kind of research, but many also used the opportunity to share their stories or share things that they had witnessed in the libraries. We included many of the quotes in our article in the Journal of Library Administration, our most recent publication about this. These stories were very powerful and frankly, heartbreaking.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: I can only imagine what it was like reading those, and it points to the importance of your work. Will you discuss your research methodology to determine what those in libraries were experiencing? Candice? 05:38
Candice Benjes-Small:
We had started with a literature review to find out how other researchers were approaching the measuring of prevalence of sexual harassment. That’s how we ran across the Sexual Experience Questionnaire. This was really important because it has been used since the late 80’s and has gone through a few modifications. We were looking specifically not just at the prevalence of sexual harassment, but who were the perpetrators. In our survey for academic libraries, we asked about prevalence from patrons as well as from coworkers, then when we did public, we did patrons, coworkers, then we added board members—because before we launched the survey, we heard that that was a population that needed to be studied, too.
We sent out the survey over many different listservs in both cases—two different surveys. Ran each one for about a month. We had close to 700 responses for our academic one, and I want to say just under 600 for our public library survey. Then we gave the numbers to Joanna and Alison, who are sociologists and know SPSS really well. And they were the ones who did all the analysis for us—thank goodness.
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
Yes, yes. Thank God for Alison and Joanna. They really did a lot of the heavy lifting with the data.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Yes. Thank goodness for those amazing researchers who helped you with this work. We probably can’t say that enough. Can you define sexual harassment so our listeners can recognize it in their libraries? Jennifer? 07:20
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
All of the articles discussed—that we read for the literature review, discussed the difficulty of defining sexual harassment. Most people agree, of course, that rape, assault, quid pro quo cases—where you’ll lose your job unless you do X. Of course, those fall into the category, but less extreme behaviors like teasing, joking, maybe like a touch of the hand, touch of the back—not obviously labeled as sexual harassment. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—their definition is more expansive than the public might realize. I was surprised when we started this research and I read their definition. Their definition is,“It is unlawful to harass a person—an applicant or employee—because of that person’s sex. Harassment can include sexual harassment, unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.
Harassment does not have to be of a sexual nature however, and can include offensive remarks about a person’s sex. For example, it is illegal to harass a woman by making offensive comments about women in general. Both victim and harasser can be either a woman or a man, or the victim and harasser can be of the same sex.
Although the law does not prohibit simple teasing, offhand comments, or isolated incidents that are not very serious, harassment is illegal when it is frequent or so severe that it creates a hostile or offensive work environment or when it results in an adverse employment decision, such as the victim being fired or demoted. The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, a coworker, or someone who is not an employee of the employer, such as a client or a customer.
Now, the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire has its own definition for sexual harassment, and that was what we used in our survey. It defined sexual harassment as unwanted, sex-related behavior at work that is appraised by the recipient as offensive, exceeding her resources, or threatening her well-being.
The SEQ uses five concepts to define the dimensions of sexual harassment. The first one is gender harassment, and that is defined as generalized sexist behaviors, sexist remarks and behaviors. Seductive behavior is defined as experiencing inappropriate and offensive, but essentially sanctioned-free sexual advances. Sexual bribery is measured as defined as solicitation of sexual activity or other sex-linked behavior by the promise of rewards. Sexual coercion is defined as coercion of sexual behavior by threat of punishment. And the last one, sexual assault, is defined as gross sexual imposition or assault.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: Thank you. How does sexual harassment in libraries affect the psychological safety of workers? Candice? 10:18
Candice Benjes-Small:
Our survey results showed that—I guess we’ll say fortunately, for lack of a better word— that most of the behaviors that were experienced were at the, quote-unquote, lesser level. They are mostly gender harassment, generalized, sexist remarks and behavior, which is one reason why I think it is so easy to be normalized. It’s like, Why would that one thing really affect you? That person—it’s just one person who comes in all the time, but they can’t hurt you. Why are you concerned? But, a common theme in the literature is that those in administration or in supervisory positions are seen as indifferent or dismissive of patron misbehaviour, and they often overlook the impact of microaggressions. So, all these little things that keep happening, they build up and are very detrimental to the mental health of the librarians. I should also just mention here that we’re using librarian as a catch-all for anyone who works at the library—paraprofessionals, operational staff also completed these surveys.
The idea of psychological safety grew out of research and organizational change. It’s the—I’m going to quote here a definition, The shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. If there’s a psychologically safe workplace, individuals believe they will not be rejected by colleagues for being themselves and feel that others care about them and respect them. Workers who feel psychologically safe are more likely to speak up about workplace problems, which is really important for a healthy workplace. Positive effects of a psychologically safe workplace include increased production, performance, learning, and creativity.
Obviously, being harassed will make employees feel less safe, but psychological safety is also really impacted, especially when a complaint about sexual harassment is not taken seriously. A victim will be less likely to share about other workplace problems, and witnesses will also emotionally shut down if they seem victims are mistreated. Why would you report something if you saw your coworker trying to do it and nothing happened, or they were punished for it? Silence about all work problems will become the norm, which is the exact opposite of a psychologically safe workplace.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: What are some possible paths to combat sexual harassment in our field? 12:45
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
Some things that can be done to help combat sexual harassment would be taking complaints seriously, protecting the complainants from retaliation, and holding the perpetrators responsible for those actions. I think those are the most important things to do. Managers need to create policies or codes of conduct which protect their employees. These policies need to explicitly state how this harassment—how these incidents will be handled.
There need to be consequences for people who are repeat or extreme offenders when it comes to sexual harassment. It’s also, I think, important to provide sexual harassment training, including the bystander training. So like, What do I do if I see my coworker being sexually harassed? I think these things are important just so people understand. I think just the data we saw from the survey shows that people don’t always understand things that are sexual harassment to be sexual harassment because of the normalization of it. I think that training can definitely help combat that.
We strongly urge the American Library Association to address the absence of a policy, like a blanket policy of this creating and promoting: Guidelines for the Development of Policies and Procedures; ALA’s Policy Checklist for User Behavior and Library Use Guidelines for Reopening Libraries During the Covid-19 Pandemic; and How to Respond to Challenges and Concerns about Library Resources, are examples of similar efforts in recent times. Sexual harassment is a profession-wide problem, and we need a need to as a profession to address it.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: Thank you Jennifer. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 14:29
Candice Benjes-Small:
Before you can develop a solution to a problem it’s essential to measure the extent of the problem. Our two studies assess the prevalence of sexual harassment in our field, and concluded that it is pretty rampant, and we hope other researchers will continue to work in this field and help answer the next question. So what can we do about it?
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Thank you, Candice. Do you have any favorite leadership books or resources, and why? 14:53
Candice Benjes-Small:
I am a big fan of Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frames, which is an approach to organizational issues that encourages leaders to use four different perspectives when you run into a situation—the structural frame, the human resources frame, the political frame, and the symbolic frame. This is really good to break out of our own perspective and thinking that there’s just one way to look at a problem. I mean, who doesn’t love a quiz, right? Just like a BuzzFeed quiz, you can take a quiz and it will tell you which of the four frames you are most strongly pulled towards. That will help you realize not only what other frames there are, but also where you’re really strong. What is your go-to frame? Then you can also sometimes, when looking at a problem, figure out which frames are the most appropriate and that helps you develop a better solution.
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
Mine, I would have to say, the Ask a Manager blog is probably one of my go-to ones. I read that thing every single day. Candice introduced me to it years ago, and it’s really helped me a lot. Alison Green—she offers practical and thoughtful advice on a wide range of workplace topics. She provides guidance on real world workplace challenges, everything from job application, to interviews, and navigating office politics, dealing with difficult coworkers, and handling performance reviews. She answers reader submitted questions, and she provides actionable advice. Like I said, she’s helped me a lot throughout the years. [laughter]
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: I appreciate those resources from both of you. In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 16:34
Jennifer Resor-Whicker:
I’ll start off. I would say to me, especially at Radford University, and just academic libraries in general, I think this applies to all libraries—libraries are the heart of learning and community. They represent a space where knowledge, culture and opportunity converge and are accessible to everyone, regardless of background or circumstance. At Radford, I say this a lot, we are the center of student fun, belonging and academic success, but I think all libraries everywhere are the center for: you can have a little fun; you can find your belonging; and you can help promote your success at libraries.
Candice Benjes-Small:
There’s the quote, If something is free, then you are the product, which we see way too often, especially in this internet-driven world, but libraries are still one of the few exceptions. They don’t require you to buy something, and we don’t sell your data. That’s a rare and treasured thing. We’re just there to promote learning and community and in an equitable way, at no cost to the user. We’re not asking you to be a paid member. We’re not selling your data like I said. Librarians, like libraries, are pure civic good, and I really think are the cornerstone for democracy.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Thank you for those thoughts. I want to share with you my appreciation for talking about the importance of libraries today, and the importance of examining the extent of sexual harassment of librarians. The fact that you’ve measured this in the workplace opens the door for it to be addressed. Hopefully, this conversation will help others think about this and work in their organizations to combat sexual harassment. Thank you for being here.
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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