Institutional Gender Regimes And Reporting Processes For Sexual Harassment

Please note that this is a hybrid event.

Physical location: The Lakehouse (Room 248), Ron Cooke Hub, University of York

Remote: The Zoom Join Link can be found in the ticket order confirmation email.

Formal complaints and disciplinary processes constitute a mandatory aspect of organizational responses for addressing sexual harassment in many jurisdictions. However, previous research has found that reporting parties are not well served by such processes. In particular, Ahmed (Complaint!; 2021) argues that the institutional climate that enables harassment or discrimination to occur—including its gendered dynamics—also shapes how complaints about harassment are handled.

Building on Ahmed's work, this presentation analyses how gender “gets into” formal reporting processes for sexual harassment within organizations. It draws on interviews with 18 students and staff who went through a formal institutional reporting process for gender-based violence or harassment in UK higher education between 2016 and 2021.

Using Connell's theorization of “gender regimes,” Dr Bull will outline how “dimensions of gender” within organizations affected different stages of formal reporting processes, including how evidence was gathered during reporting processes, as well as how it was assessed. These findings demonstrate that gender regimes—via gender relations of power, gendered “attachments and investments,” and “gender-neutral” processes—can override formal processes and affect outcomes of sexual harassment reporting. These findings explain how gender regimes contribute to the failure of sexual harassment complaints to be upheld within organizations.

Dr Anna Bull is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York and a director of The 1752 Group, a research and campaign organisation addressing staff/faculty sexual misconduct in higher education. Her research interests include inequalities in classical music education and the profession; and sexual harassment in higher education and the creative industries. Her research has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, British Academy, Research England, and Higher Education Funding Council for England. Anna’s monograph Class, Control, and Classical Music, published in 2019 with Oxford University Press, won the British Sociological Association Philip Abrams prize in 2020. In 2021, industry publication Times Higher Education named her as one of their ‘Faces of 2021’, noting that her research ‘has made a substantial contribution to our understanding of the problem’ of sexual misconduct in universities.

Host or Publisher Department of Sociology