You may have recently heard that half of U.S. women have experienced sexual harassment. Riding on the coattails of #MeToo, both ABC News and The Washingston Post conducted a survey on sexual harassment. However, even though this survey included male participants, the surveys only asked female participants if they had actually experienced sexual harassment. Men were only asked whether they felt sexual harassment was a problem for women.

ABC and the Washington Post shared a single survey which they commissioned from Langer Research. Langer did a random telephone survey. I’m a little unclear on the sample size since the methodology report claims they called 1000 households, but the survey reported a total of 1010 adults (the study cites 1260, but only 1010 answered the questions), even though they were only supposed to survey one adult per household. Anyway, it looks like they surveyed a total 740 women, which I assume also means 270 men. So that is an obvious sex sampling imbalance from the start.

Survey respondents were asked 6 questions, but only two of the questions were asked to both women and men:

“Do you think sexual harassment of women in the workplace is a problem in this country or not?” [emphasis added]



“Generally speaking, do you think that a man who sexually harasses a woman in the workplace usually (is punished for it), or usually (gets away with it)?”

The other four questions about victimization were asked only to women. Women were first asked a gateway question to determine if they have been victimized:

“Have you ever received unwanted sexual advances from a man” that:

“a. that you felt were inappropriate, or not? This can be in any circumstance, whether or not work”

“b. who worked for the same company as you, or not”?

“c. who had influence over your work situation, or not related”? (3)

Notice “unwanted sexual advances” is not defined by the survey. If the woman doesn’t answer “yes” to this question, she isn’t asked the remaining victimization questions.

Notice the ABC-Post survey also doesn’t only exclude male victims of sexual harassment but also female victims of sexual harassment by another female. A female employee whose female boss demanded she perform cunnilingus on her daily or lose her job would not be considered a victim of an “unwanted sexual advance” by this survey. Hell, the female boss could be violently raping the female employee everyday and the employee still wouldn’t be marked as a victim simply simply because the boss is a woman. The same problem applies to the question about whether or not only men get away from sexual harassment.

It appears a woman is only asked the remaining victimization questions if she answers “yes” to “b” or “c”. The next question asks if she considered any of the incidents “sexual harassment”, “sexual abuse”, (both also not defined by the survey) both, neither or just “no opinion” (4). Then she is asked whether or not they reported the “unwanted sexual advances”. Then she is asked if any of the following words describe her “feelings about these unwanted sexual advances”: “[h]umilitaed”, “[i]ntimiated”, “[a]ngry”, “[a]shamed” (4).

I’m not going to deep dive into numbers here. The failure to strictly define “unwanted sexual advance”, “sexual harassment” and “sexual assault” is reason enough to dismiss the survey. These terms are imprecise and do not have agreed upon shared definitions. For example, does “sexual harassment” only include harassment of a sexual nature or does it also include harassment based on a person’s sex? Is calling someone a “cunt” or a “dick” sexual harassment? Is sex discrimination also sexual harassment? Many people would consider one-time offenses “sexual harassment” even though “harassment” by definition must be a sustained and repeated behavior. Does “sexual abuse” necessarily involve physical contact? Notice while 79% of women who reported “sexual advances” considered one or more of the experiences to be “sexual harassment” only 33% considered one or more of their experiences to be “sexual abuse”. So most didn’t considered their experience of “sexual harassment” as abusive?

My point is that people have differing opinions about what these terms mean. We really don’t know what actually happened to these women. That is why its so important that surveys’ define these terms explicitly.

Another reason to dismiss the survey is that it makes no effort to establish any sort of time frame that could uncover an estimated victimization rate. How many “unwanted sexual advances” occurred this year? Are “unwanted sexual advances” going up or down? This survey can’t tell us. All of these instances of “unwanted sexual advances” might have occurred years ago. We might actually be in the middle of record low for sexual harassment. By simply asking women if they have experience unwanted sexual advances over their entire lifetime the survey is guaranteeing itself the largest, most sensation (but also entirely useless) number.

All this makes me think ABC News and the Washington Post weren’t trying to uncover the truth about sexual harassment. Rather they were just trying to concoct a sensational statistic showing women’s oppression at the hands of men. Why else would they intentionally exclude men (half the U.S. population) from its victimization questions, even though they were already talking to them on the telephone anyway!

Notice ABC is pushes the most sensational “unwanted sexual advances” number to the front of its article, even though only 79% considered those advances “sexual harassment” and only 33% considered them “sexual abuse”.

The Washington Post is even worse, leading with the data about how many respondents “think sexual harassment of women” is a problem.

Fear or concern of victimization is often much higher than actual victimization (especially when there has been a decades long sex offense panic in the U.S.). I’m always suspicious surveys add this type of question in case their reported victimization numbers aren’t sensational enough.

Also notice the only reference the Washington Post makes to a previous 2011 ABC-Post survey is to point out that the percentage of respondents concerned about sexual harassment has gone up. I had to track down the 2011 survey because the Washington Post strangely didn’t include a link to it. Once I did it was clear why.

The 2011 survey has many of the same problems as the 2017 survey: no set time frame, no set definitions, men were strangely excluded from some victimization questions and women excluded from questions on false accusations. However, the 2011 survey didn’t ask about “unwanted sexual advances”, but asked both men and women if they had “ever been sexually harassed at work or not?”(2). This makes the 2017 survey’s exclusion of male victims even more suspicious. The 2011 survey report reads:

“One in four women has experienced workplace sexual harassment, this ABC News/Washington Post poll finds. One in 10 men say they’ve experienced it as well and a quarter of men say they worry about being falsely accused of sexual harassment.”



“Experience of harassment also is down from its peak, from 32 percent of women in surveys in late 1992 and mid-1994 to 24 percent now” (1)

Attempting to square these previous findings with the 2017 survey’s 51% “unwanted sexual advances” statistic might cause readers to view this data more critically. I don’t think that is what the Washington Post wants. I think they want to give readers the biggest number possible and for readers to swallow it without question. This is probably why ABC omitted any mention of the previous 2011 survey from its article. ABC and the Washington Post wanted to present the most sensational view of their 2017 data.

Consider I could just as easily summarize the 2017 surrey as:

Although a slim majority of U.S. women (51%) reported having received one or more vagued defined “unwanted sexual advances from a man” during their entire lifetimes, not all considered these advances sexual harassment and only a minority of these women actually considered their experiences sexual abuse. Furthermore, the vast majority (68%) of these “unwanted sexual advances” did not come from men working within or with their companies and a even larger majority (75%) claimed these advances they did not come from a man with influence over their work situation.

That’s a very different way of explaining the exact same data.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the Washington Post’s involvement in something like this. I still remember their strained attempt to concoct a new bogus 1-in-5 college women are raped stat. This flawed survey tells us nothing useful about sexual harassment in the U.S. It seems ABC and the Post didn’t care about seriously researching sexual harassment, but just wanted to feed the narrative that women are constantly sexually harassed by men. Is this intentional feminist propaganda or just two media giants recklessly feeding the moral panic of the day for more clicks? Maybe a bit of both?