The Game Within the Game: How Women Navigate and Label Workplace Harassment in the #MeToo Era

Shekinah Hoffman

Harassment remains a pervasive reality for many women in the workplace, yet few explicitly label their experiences as such. Instead, women often adopt alternative labels or avoid labeling altogether—a phenomenon feminist scholars call “non-labeling.” The non-labeling process, in which women make sense of and choose not to use the harassment label, is shaped by many influences, including social movements, organizational culture, and individual characteristics. Existing research conceptualizes non-labeling narrowly, often suggesting that a single factor can explain both why women avoid the harassment label and how they arrive at that decision. Drawing on 56 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women working in the U.S. gaming (gambling) industry, my dissertation uses a feminist, constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how women navigate labeling, or not labeling, their experiences with workplace harassment. Although many women’s experiences met legal and scholarly definitions of gender, racial, and/or sexual harassment, they often chose not to label them as such, instead reframing them with less stigmatizing labels such as “inappropriate behavior.” Moving beyond singular explanations, I argue that non-labeling is a multifaceted, fluid process shaped by intersecting macro-, meso-, and individual-level factors. The sociocultural context of the #MeToo movement and postfeminist ideology (macro), a male-dominated and overtly-sexualized industry culture (meso), and women’s racial identities and positional power (individual) collectively shape women’s decisions not to label their experiences as harassment. Choosing non-labels is strategic: it allows women to acknowledge their experiences while maintaining agency and sidestepping the stigma and professional repercussions attached to the harassment label. Understanding how women choose, or choose not, to label is critical not only to explaining the widespread under-reporting of workplace harassment, but also to illuminate the societal and organizational factors that perpetuate it. Study findings have important implications for designing workplace interventions that more effectively address harassment, support women’s agency, and cultivate safer, more equitable work environments.

The Game Within the Game: How Women Navigate and Label Workplace Harassment in the #MeToo Era

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details