Nearly half of disabled women and one-third of disabled men say they have been sexually harassed at work, new survey finds

Disabled employees are more likely to experience sexual harassment than their non-disabled peers.

That’s according to the results of a new survey of more than 20,000 US adults by The 19th and Survey Monkey. Some 48% of disabled women reported having experienced sexual harassment at work, compared with 32% of non-disabled women. Disabled men were almost three times (32%) as likely as their non-disabled peers (11%) to say they had experienced sexual harassment or violence at work.

“Women with disabilities have a lot of barriers just to get into the workforce. So many keep their heads down while there, because they’re afraid to lose the position they’re currently in. I think sexual harassment against women with disabilities is pervasive,” Stephanie Woodward, a lawyer and co-founder of the mentoring coalition Disability EmpowHer Network, told The 19th.

LaWanda Cook, senior extension associate at the Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability at Cornell University, told HR Brew that HR leaders need to pay attention to civility issues in the workplace and the unique experiences faced by employees of marginalized identities. Workplace sexual harassment and violence is a component of that.

The survey spotlights the intersection of disability and gender. “[The survey] really speaks to how we view disability our society, how we look at things like attractiveness, and really, even the comfort that people without obvious disabilities, or without known disabilities, have sometimes toward folks whose disabilities are obvious,” Cook explained.

Cook said that HR should understand that harassment doesn’t need to be intentional to still be harmful and that a person’s identity may play a role in perception.

“When we’re talking about things like sexual harassment, we should be talking about it in the context of things like disability and gender and age and race,” she said. “Those multiple identities do shape how people experience these kinds of things, the frequency with which they might experience the types of behaviors that they're subjected to, and then how they might interpret that situation based on all the different histories that they carry and kind of navigate.”

When HR leaders choose or develop harassment training, Cook said they should consult workers from different backgrounds, including those in employee resource groups, and not only have sexual harassment policies, but consistently hold people to them. It’s about, “expecting people to be civil from top down and understanding what that looks like to different communities of workers.”