The likelihood of being harassed at work depends on both sex and income

Thankfully, only a minority of people say that their superior or co-worker has harassed them at work. In this international dataset, 15% of women and 11% of men said they had been harassed in the past 5 years. [Dataset: 36 countries, 21,000 valid responses, from the International Social Survey Programme Work Orientations Module in 2015.]

Also thankfully, the prevalence doesn’t seem to rise drastically for any particular demographic group. As the chart shows, women are more likely than men to state that they have been harassed, in all age categories (columns of the chart) and income groups (rows of the chart). In addition, lower-income employees (top two rows) of either sex are more likely to say they have faced harassment at work.

The more detailed patterns are a little harder to decipher. Age seems to make a limited difference, even though it appears that older women feel more harassed than young ones in the middle-income category. Indeed, if we look at the gap in harassment-prevalence between men and women, it is highest among medium-income women.