After #MeToo And #NoMore It’s Time For #HowMuch

Columnist Joe Davidson raises the question: How much does sexual harassment cost? 

What is the economic impact to the workplace of men (mostly) who impose their warped notions of sexual superiority on female colleagues?

A group of Democratic senators turned to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan American agency that works for the Congress, to do the research. They want the agency to examine the “economic effect on the U.S. economy and federal workforce.”

About one-fifth of female federal employees experienced sexual harassment between 2014 and 2016 in the United States.

Before asking GAO to do the research, the senators pushed the Labor Department to study the economic impact of sexual harassment.

Women who have been harassed are 6.5 times more likely to change jobs than those who have not, the senators wrote in a letter. When a worker changes jobs or industries, there are costs for the employer as well as the worker. 

The Labor Department decided, three months later, the study would be too hard and too expensive to conduct.

However, the same kind of study was already done in 1994. It was estimated that over the course of two years, sexual harassment in the federal workforce cost the government a total of $327.1 million ($556 million today) as a result of job turnover, sick leave, and decreased productivity.

"Consider this from the National Equity Atlas," the columnist adds: “Our national GDP could be 14 per cent or $2 trillion higher if the wage disparity between white employees and employees of colour was eliminated.”