The incidence and dimensions of sexual harassment in academia and the workplace.

Abstract Although only recently reaching public and scholarly awareness as an important issue, the sexual harassment of women workers and students has been a problem for as long as women have worked and studied outside the home. Although now recognized as an important barrier to women's career development, sexual harassment has proven difficult to study due to the lack of a commonly accepted definition and any standardized instrumentation that could provide comparable results across studies. This paper describes the results of research undertaken to provide such an instrument, which we call the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire. The following sections will detail the instrument's development, results of psychometric analyses undertaken (including reliability and validity), and finally, the results of the application of the inventory to two large public universities. In addition, we describe the development of a second form of the inventory designed for working women and report the results for a large sample of academic, professional and semiprofessional, and blue-collar women.