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» Stats, Facts & Figures

Violence Against Women in the Workplace is

Prevalent –

• In Bangalore, India, over 60% of female garment workers have been intimidated or threatened with violence at work.
• Women who waitress in the U.S., who rely on tips to supplement their sub minimum wages, report rates of 90% having experienced sexual harassment on the job, and for many it is happening on a weekly basis.
• In an extensive Human Rights Watch publication, female migrant domestic workers worldwide reported across the board that they were victims of verbal, sexual physical abuse. Women such as the brave Indonesian migrant domestic worker, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, who was reported to have narrowly escaped death after her employer forcefully beat her on the job, are leading the movement for global reform of an industry that routinely incudes rape, physical violence, discrimination, humiliation and restricted rights and freedoms.
• In the US, more than 60 percent of 150 female farmworkers interviewed said they had experienced some form of sexual harassment, according to a study conducted by UC Santa Cruz.
• In Zambia, 81 percent of women have faced sexual harassment at work.
• In California, female janitors participated in a hunger strike to bring attention to sexual violence on the nightshift. For trans workers the threat of violence and discrimination is amplified, researchers in the European Union found that over the course of just 12 months one in three trans participants felt discriminated against because of being trans when looking for a job (37 %) or while at work (27 %).

Gendered –

Workplace violence is not universal, it is targeted at women – and at the highest rates in jobs traditionally seen as “women’s work”; caretakers, nurses, domestic workers, etc. And in male dominated workplaces, women are more likely to face patriarchal mindsets and sexist barriers that protect perpetrators and silence women. This was exemplified in the very recent case of former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who was exposed for using sexual exploitation and fear tactics for years against multiple female employees. Women laborers in Honduras report forced pregnancy tests administered as a part of the hiring process, and women are routinely not-hired or fired if they become pregnant. Women with disabilities face multiple barriers to safe spaces of work, according to a global report that lists unemployment as a consequence of citing examples, where the abuser may harass or intimidate them in the workplace, harass other employees or prevent them from going to work at all as a mechanism of control, causing them to lose employment.

Deadly –

• Domestic workers in Hong Kong are fighting the illegal and deadly practice of forcing them to clean apartment windows, from the outside, on high-rise apartments. In 2016 alone, at least 5 maids have died in the process.
• In the US alone, 41 people in the sex industry were murdered in 2015; a third of them were transgender.
• Throughout history, women in the textile industry have been forced to work under inhumane conditions, and have been killed en masse in preventable fires, from Triangle Shirtwaist to Tarzeen, and building collapses like the tragedy at Rana Plaza.

Additional Resources

• Ending Gender-Based Violence in the World of Work; Report by ALF-CIO, Futures Without Violence & Solidarity Center
• Startup workers see sexual harassment on ‘breathtaking’ scale in Silicon Valley; By Sam Levin, The Guardian
• Workers File Sexual Harassment Claims Against McDonald’s; By Tessa Berenson, TIME
• The Revenge of Roger’s Angels How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media; By Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine
• What Walmart and the Trumps Get Wrong About #WomenWhoWork; By Andrea Dehlendorf, Co-Director of the Organization United for Respect (OUR)