New Research: What actually helps when workers report harassment?
Dear Friends of Courage,
When a customer wouldn't stop harassing Alexis, a young barista, she told her supervisor — and within days, the store banned him. Alexis said the relief felt like a dream. That's the kind of workplace response our new study set out to understand.
I'm excited to share new findings on sexual harassment from research that sociologists Christianne Corbett and Meghan Warner, psychologist Sarah Harsey, and I just published in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PLOS ONE.
The backstory: Workplace sexual harassment remains widespread, and how an organization responds matters enormously. Prior research has found that when institutions respond to harassment with betrayal — denial, inaction, protecting the accused — victims suffer worse outcomes. But when institutions respond with courage — genuine accountability and support — workers report greater job satisfaction, stronger trust in management, and better wellbeing. We've now seen this pattern replicated among university students too.
What's new: We wanted to know, in workers' own words, what courage actually looks like in practice. So we interviewed 30 U.S. workers — most from the service industry in the San Francisco Bay Area — who had experienced sexual harassment at work.
Two things stood out.
Before anything happens: Workers felt safer at organizations where leaders talked openly about harassment before an incident ever occurred — making clear it wouldn't be tolerated, and that there would be real consequences. One participant, a solar company employee, described her managers casually but consistently reminding staff to "behave" at work events — and said it made her feel the company was watching out for her.
After something happens: Three practices made the biggest difference. First, workers needed someone outside their normal chain of command to report to — several told us they stayed silent because their only reporting option was uncomfortably close to the person who harassed them. Second, they needed someone to actually listen and validate what happened, rather than let it "slip under the rug." Third, they needed follow-through — real consequences for the harasser, and, ideally, not having to keep working alongside the person who hurt them.
Why it matters: These aren't abstract policy ideas — they're the specific, concrete things workers told us made them feel protected rather than abandoned. (Additional steps for nurturing institutional courage are here.) For employers, the message is simple: silence and inaction compound harm, while clear expectations and decisive action can prevent it.
Read the full study, "Sexual Harassment at Work: Targets' Perspectives on Prevention and Response," free and open-access in PLOS ONE:
Corbett C, Warner MO, Harsey SJ, Freyd JJ (2026). PLOS ONE 21(7): e0352783.
With appreciation for your support of Courage,
Jennifer Joy Freyd, PhD
Founder and President
Center for Institutional Courage