Olive Faruq

Sexual harassment in the workplace can begin as soon as you’re able to enter the workforce. The American Association of University Women found that “more than 50% of high school girls reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment throughout a single school year.” It’s so common that, according to the report, many teenage girls don’t know how to recognize it or its varying degrees. 

Amy Blackstone, a professor of sociology at the University of Maine, said for CNN that “it’s in high school jobs that people learn the norms of the workplace.” Researchers Susan Fineran and James E. Gruber at the University of Southern Maine state that “in 2005, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed fifteen employment discrimination lawsuits involving teenage workers and sexual harassment.” It was also reported that “80 to 90% of adolescents work at some point during high school and most of them are employed in retail sales, restaurants, grocery stores, and health care,” all of which are service based work and introductory level part-time jobs. 

Considering that teenage girls are “young, single, and have low job status,” Fineran and Gruber predicted that teenage girls would be subjected to sexual harassment as a natural result of these aspects which enhance their vulnerability in a workplace setting. Yet Fineran and Gruber note that “it is surprising, however, that the teenagers experienced significantly higher levels of harassment than adults given that they all described their jobs as part-time.” They continue by revealing “it is especially troubling that the girls experienced levels of sexual coercion that were comparable to those of fully-employed adult women.” The results of their study further proved that “similarly, the percentages of [women] who experienced unwanted sexual attention among three occupational groups” were “significantly lower than the figure for teens.” Additionally, it demonstrated that “teenage girls not only experienced more harassment but also that it occurred in a shorter time period.” 

Olive Faruq is a student at UMass Boston who currently works at Blackbird Doughnuts on Beacon Hill and has been working part-time since she was sixteen years old. “In high school, my first job was at a Dunkin Donuts, and there was this one customer who would come in, probably in his late-thirties,” she said. Faruq added that “at first I thought he was just being nice, and he just wanted to go out of his way to make the workers feel special,” but she later realized something was off. “He would repetitively come in multiple times a day, and I noticed he would come in significantly more when I was working alone, or working with one or two other girls that were all in high school at the same time as me.” His predatory behavior escalated over the course of nine months. “He would bring me little gifts and he had a pretty unique car, and I would start seeing it. I saw it at my high school parking lot and by my house, just places that a grown adult normally wouldn’t, or shouldn’t be, going to.” After his demeanor ceased to stop, Faruq said that “overtime he just got creepier and creepier each time he came in, to the point where I did talk to management about it, and they didn’t do much.” Faruq later took it upon herself to leave. 

In the face of unwanted customer attention, Faruq’s decision to withdraw from her job due to poor managerial response was reflected by other girls in the same study conducted by Fineran and Gruber. Girls in Fineran and Gruber’s study “experienced greater work stress and lower satisfaction with their coworkers and supervisors,” and were “more apt to think about leaving their jobs.” Retrospectively, about her experience, Faruq said “overall it just a scary position especially when you’re sixteen, you’re so naive and it’s your first job; you’re excited, and someone is interfering with that by being a creepy individual.” 

Knowing that sexual harassment takes place so frequently to girls and women in the workplace, the natural question to ask is what can be done, what can change to ensure this doesn’t continue? The answer isn’t as cut and dry, but perhaps demands can be pointed to leaders in management and the culture of service work at large. Dating back as far as 1990, Judi Brownwell at Cornell University said about adequate managerial changes: “no longer are the highly rational, mechanical models of the past appropriate.” Sexual harassment in the service industry, above all, need not be interpreted with complacency any longer. In light of the “Me Too” Movement of the recent past, and numerous unions blossoming across the country, never did a more appropriate time arise to turn attention toward how women can be better protected in their workplace.