The Department of Sociolinguistics and Discourse Studies kindly invites everyone interested to an open lecture by Professor Joanna Pawelczyk (AMU Poznań) and Professor Judith E. Rosenstein (U.S. Naval Academy): You know there are comments sometimes little things here and there: Using discourse analysis to identify women’s experiences of gender harassment. The lecture will be held on November 9, at 16:30, in room 155 at Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, (Grunwaldzka 6)
Abstract
Gender harassment is the most common form of sexual harassment in organizations. Simultaneously, however, it is the most complex to identify and challenging to address organizationally. This is because it often takes on low-level and subtle forms, that can be either verbal or non-verbal, making victims feel uncertain as to what they have exactly experienced. Analytically this calls for the use of methods that are sensitive to participants’ language use.
In this paper, we apply qualitative discourse analysis to a set of in-depth semi-structured interviews with women students at a US military service academy to identify how they describe and process their gender experiences. Through discursive analysis of the interviews it becomes clear that although they do not label it as such, these women experience behavior that meets the definition of gender harassment. Moreover, discourse analysis, as a method sensitive to what the participants are saying and how they are saying it, allows us to reveal that women discursively minimize their gender-harassing experiences, yet simultaneously struggle to give a sense of that experience to the interviewer. By scrutinizing the details of language use we also identify the nature and content of gender harassment as constructed by our women interviewees. We conclude with some organizational implications to better address issues of gender harassment.