A Sociological Study of Sexual Harassment Experience by Women in Workplace (Empirical Test of Routine Activity Theory)

Abstract

Introduction: the present research, have been aimed to study amount of the experience of sexual harassment of employed women in the workplace and the social analysis of the causes of sexual harassment. Method : In this research, the theory of Routine activities has been used as a theoretical framework and has been surveyed by a questionnaire tool among 400 women working in hospitals in Karaj. Findings : The descriptive results of this study show that 67% of respondents experienced at least one occurrence of sexual harassment (verbal and non-verbal) at work. It was also found that the proportion of non-verbal distur bances (such as Hayes’s look, etc.) was slightly higher compared to the verbal disturbance (reverberation, etc.). Discussion : Thus, according to the results of this study, the amount of experience of sexual harassment of employed women in the workplace was greater among those women who, on the one hand, had some demographic and personal characteristics that made them more suit able for the victim of harassment Sexual orientation, sec -ondly, at work, there were men who had more motivated men to engage in sexual harassment, and, thirdly, at work there was not enough organizational and personal protection to prevent sexual harassment. This result sug-gests that the theory of routine activities is predictive of sexual harassment in the workplace.