Data Visualization: Sexual Harassment
The three data visualizations picked for this assignment tackle a very relevant topic; organizational sexual harassment. The first graph was retrieved from GreyLaw (2013), a law firm that derived its data from the EEOC governmental agency, aware.org, and workharrassment.net. It provides an overview of the inter-organizational sexual harassment facts and figures through the use of colorful charts and creative illustrations, using the silhouettes of men and women are a customized chart to be filled out in accordance to the statistic studied. Moreover, the graph is in black, white, and grey, as well as red and blue to indicate the figures relating to women and men respectively. As for the second graph and third graphs, they were both retrieved from Bloomberg (2017) as the first addresses the power imbalance between genders and the second shows the level of reporting the abuse. The “power-balance” figure draws a graph that acts as a function, plotting points (companies) across two axes that show the distribution of gender across a company overall, and across the managerial executive positions. The third graph is perhaps the simplest, drawing multi-colored boxed with each box’s size reflecting the percentage written on it concerning whether victims report abuse and their level of satisfaction surrounding their reporting. Taking in all three graphs, we hope to draw a clearer image about at least one of the causes of sexual harassment as well as the reason behind why it goes under-reported.
The three graphs, despite not necessarily extending the width of our knowledge about the issue, provided more depth as it allowed us to link several factors together in order to reach a conclusion about what causes harassment to go by unnoticed and unpunished in many cases. The first figure clearly shows that abuse happens for the most part (70%) at a senior level and then goes on to show that men are completely responsible for the harassment that females undergo. They are also partially responsible for the harassment that certain men face. As a result, the figure presents the high-powered men as the source of the problem and the main harassers in an organization. As far as the rest of the graph goes, it doesn’t add significant information besides noting that the level of reporting of sexual harassment has decreased since 2011 and the level of compensations brought by court has also dropped. The remaining information found in that figure from what constitutes harassment, who the responsible parties are, and which gender suffers from more harassment are all common knowledge for the most part. Building on this announcement that figure 1 attempts to drive the viewers towards, which is that powerful men in organizations are the prime suspects in the average harassment case, the second graph (Power Imbalance) tends to explain the reason behind that.
The Bloomberg figure, which shows that level of male and female executives as a function of the overall gender division in each of the Stoxx Europe 600 companies, is a reflection of the power imbalance that Europe faces. Although the first graph was based on the United States, the issue of sexual harassment is universal and therefore the geographic disparity between both data visualizations is considered insignificant especially because Europe and the USA are ideologically similar when it comes to gender equality issues.
Moving on, Bloomberg’s Power Imbalance figure shows that the vast majority of companies have more male executives and more male employees in general. The second largest group of companies is the one which has more female employees but a higher rate of male executives. Adding both of the previous figures together, we can see that the absolute vast majority of companies, regardless of whether they have more male or female employees overall. There are only two small sized companies that have more female executives and more female employees overall, and only one company with less female employees overall but more female executive. This graph highlights an important piece of the puzzle and it adds a new layer to the issue as it signals that perhaps the power difference between males and females in high positions encourages some men to abuse this power and harass their female co-workers.
This power imbalance not only explains the reasoning behind powerful men being behind the majority of harassments, but it also explains how reporting such incidents witnessed a decline between 2011 and 2013. The third graph, also retrieved from Bloomberg, shows that 79% of women don’t report sexual harassment, and out of the 21% that do, 7% report unsatisfactory responses from upper management compared to 6% who report satisfactory action. Therefore, we can now construct a potential cause-effect chain derived from the three data visualizations under study. The link is as follows: sexual harassment is carried out mostly by powerful men in organizations, and they are empowered to commit such offenses due to the organizational structures which assign the majority of managerial positions to them. Moreover, this male-dominant structure discourages women from reporting their cases out of fear of retaliation and even when they do, they are more likely to be left dissatisfied with the response taken. As a result, the three graphs added more depth to our existing notions about sexual harassment.
It should be noted that the data visualizations don’t adopt a certain ideology but they do present the findings from the perspective of the victims. The only mention of the opposing views was made in the first figure when it was mentioned that 54% of the claims lack reasonable cause but there was no mention of the reasons behind why some claims are rejected, particularly relating to attempts of force against mistreatment. In this social climate, and the presents of harassment all over the world, it’s perhaps understandable to see why the argument is becoming one-sided in defense of the victim.
