To Add or to Multiply? Gender, Sexual Minority Status, and Sexual Harassment in the Norwegian Police Service

Sexual harassment remains a pervasive problem in organizations, causing harm to individual targets, work groups, and organizations at large (Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018; Quick & McFadyen, 2017; Raver & Gelfand, 2005; Willness et al., 2007). In research on sexual harassment at work, the sexual orientation of targets is commonly ignored (Cortina & Areguin, 2021; Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018; Quick & McFadyen, 2017). However, some theorists and researchers argue (and find) that women and men who in some way challenge established gender group distinctions, such as lesbian women and gay men, are more likely to be exposed to sexual harassment (Berdahl, 2007a; Konik & Cortina, 2008; Stockdale, 2005). Both theoretically and empirically, however, it is not clear how gender interacts with sexual minority status in predicting sexual harassment experiences, and the limited research on the topic is equivocal (Hajizadeh et al., 2019; Konik & Cortina, 2008; Schuyler et al., 2020). We outline two competing perspectives on the relationship between gender and sexual minority status on experiences of sexual harassment: gender and sexual minority status as independent risk factors (additive effects) versus sexual minority status as a stronger risk factor for men (interactive effects).

As research on organizational diversity has developed over the last decades, there has been an increasing recognition that individuals are members of multiple social categories and that the implications of belonging to one specific category are shaped by membership in one or more other categories (Hall et al., 2019; Hebl et al., 2020; Jones et al., 2017; Marcus, 2022; Özbilgin et al., 2011). While there have been important theoretical developments on how the evaluation, treatment, and outcomes of individuals is shaped by multicategory memberships, how sexual orientation interacts with other category memberships has not been thoroughly addressed neither theoretically nor empirically (Hall et al., 2019; Jones et al., 2017; Marcus, 2022; Özbilgin et al., 2011). More attention has been paid to the interplay between gender and race, as well as gender and age. An important insight from this literature is that membership in an ethnic/racial category can both amplify and weaken the gendered expectations that individuals face at work (Hall et al., 2019). Moreover, membership in age-based categories (e.g., older) do not have the same implications for women and men (Marcus, 2022). One key implication for the interaction of gender and sexual orientation is that differences between sexual minority men and women in organizational experiences, such as exposure to sexual harassment, need not parallel differences between sexual majority men and women.

Empirically, we draw on data from more than 4000 employees in the Norwegian Police Service (NPS), collected as part of a larger investigation of diversity and work experiences in the NPS. The police context is well-suited to study issues of gender, sexuality, and harassment. Police organizations are often described as fostering hypermasculine organizational (sub)cultures, featuring hypersexuality in the form of crude jokes, nonconsensual sexual touching, and other forms of sexual harassment (Brown et al., 2020; Steinþórsdóttir & Pétursdóttir, 2017, 2022). The Norwegian Police Service provides a particularly interesting context for the study of sexual harassment. On the on hand, the NPS is among the least male-dominated police services in Europe with women making up 46% of employees (Rubio et al., 2021; The Norwegian Police Service, 2022). Previous and current action plans for diversity explicitly address LGBT/LGBTIQ + issues, both within the NPS as an organization and in the relationship between the police and the public (The Norwegian Police Directorate, 2008; The Norwegian Police Service, 2022). NPS personnel and members of the Police Union participate in Pride (Politiets Fellesforbund [The Police Union], 2022). In many ways, the NPS reflects the broader national context of Norway characterized by high levels of gender equality and laws securing the rights and protection of LGBT individuals (LGBT rights by country or territory, 2023; World Economic Forum, 2022). On the other hand, both media reports and surveys carried out by the NPS and the Police Union document that sexual harassment is far from absent (Grindem & Inderhaug, 2020; Rambøll Management Consulting, 2020). These surveys document that women are more exposed to sexual harassment than men, but they do not address the sexual harassment of sexual minorities.

We contribute to moving the field of sexual harassment research forward by highlighting the experiences of sexual minority women and men and how these may differ in systematic and meaningful ways from those of sexual majority members. Our study expands on previous research by addressing a new national context and contributes to the broader literature on the work environment experiences of sexual minorities in general (Martinez et al., 2017) and sexual minority police employees in particular (Jones & Williams, 2015).

Definitions of Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is both a legal and a psychological concept (Guidelines on discrimination because of sex, 2016; Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018; Fitzgerald et al., 1995). Stemming from the classification of Till (1980) and Fitzgerald and colleagues’ tripartite model (Fitzgerald et al., 1988, 1995), researchers in psychology typically distinguish between gender harassment, unwelcome sexual advances, and sexual coercion as three closely related forms of sexual harassment (Cortina & Areguin, 2021; Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018). Cortina and Areguin (2021, p. 287) define gender harassment as behaviors that “communicates denigrating, demeaning, or hostile attitudes based on gender or sex.” Examples include insulting the ability of women and men to perform specific type of jobs, sexually degrading images and words in the environment, obscene gestures, and vulgar terms of address. The second form, unwanted sexual attention, entails “sexual advances that are uninvited, unwanted, and unreciprocated by the recipient” (Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018, p. 218). These advances span from sexually suggestive comments, attempts to establish romantic or sexual relationships, unwanted touching, grabbing, and holding to sexual assault, attempted rape, and rape (Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018). Sexual coercion is the rarest form of sexual harassment (Cortina & Areguin, 2021). It entails the promise of rewards and/or the threat of harms contingent upon the target’s compliance with sexual requests or demands. Whereas gender harassment and unwanted sexual advances map on to the legal construct of hostile environment harassment, sexual coercion reflects quid pro quo harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1995).

Both unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion involve the harasser trying to instigate sexual/romantic relationships that the target does not want (Holland et al., 2016, p. 18). These behaviors represent what Sojo et al. (2016) term high-intensity/low-frequency experiences: experiences that are perceived to have more potential for harm in a single event and that occur infrequently. In contrast, gender harassment can be classified as a low-intensity, high-frequency experience; it happens more frequently but is perceived to be less harmful or serious (Sojo et al., 2016). Because of their similarities, other researchers have conceptualized unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion under the broader term sexual advance harassment (Holland et al., 2016) or sexualized harassment (Konik & Cortina, 2008; Lim & Cortina, 2005). In this paper, we also consider sexual harassment as encompassing both gender harassment and sexual advance harassment.

Sexual Harassment, Gender, and Sexual Minority Status

Both women and men are targets of sexual harassment, but prevalence rates are typically higher among women, especially among women working in male-dominated occupations traditionally reserved for men (Cortina & Areguin, 2021; U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 2018). Whereas women are almost exclusively harassed by men, when men experience sexual harassment, the harasser is often another man (Cortina & Areguin, 2021; Fasting et al., 2021; Magley et al., 1999; Rambøll Management Consulting, 2020; Steinþórsdóttir & Pétursdóttir, 2017; U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1981, 1995). The latter fact indicates that sexual desire is not the only, or even the primary, motive underlying sexual harassment. Rather, it is broadly consistent with theories rooting sexual harassment in issues of power, dominance, and status (Berdahl, 2007a; Fitzgerald & Cortina, 2018; Popovich & Warren, 2010; Stockdale, 2005; Stockdale et al., 1999).

Stockdale (2005)—writing on the sexual harassment of men—argues that sexual harassment falls into two broad categories: approach-based harassment in which sexual attention is the key motive and rejection-based harassment which is motivated primarily by humiliation or debasement. The latter form, which closely parallels the concept of gender harassment, perpetuates hypermasculine, heterosexist gender norms. Similarly, in her theory of sex-based harassment to protect social status, Berdahl (2007a) proposes that women and men who in some way challenge established gender group distinctions are more likely to be targets of sexual harassment. This proposition is supported by studies of the sexual harassment of men that point to the enforcement of the heterosexual male gender role as a form of gender harassment targeting men perceived to be effeminate, weak, or gay (Berdahl et al., 1996; Stockdale et al., 1999; Waldo et al., 1998). Similarly, women with more “masculine” personalities (Berdahl, 2007b; Leskinen et al., 2015), women who do “men’s jobs” (Willness et al., 2007), women in positions of leadership (McLaughlin et al., 2012; Tinkler & Zhao, 2020), and women with less feminine appearances (Leskinen et al., 2015) experience more sexual harassment. Leskinen et al. (2015) suggest that one reason that counter-stereotypical women are targeted is that they are perceived to be lesbian or queer. Their conjecture is supported by research demonstrating that perceivers rely heavily on stereotypes (e.g., about femininity/masculinity, interests, personality, occupation) to infer the sexual orientation of unknown individuals (Cox et al., 2016) and that people who violate gender role expectations are perceived as gay or lesbian (Henry & Steiger, 2022). It also aligns with work demonstrating that gender and sexual orientation are fundamentally intertwined in social perception (Henry & Steiger, 2022; Klysing et al., 2021).

This feature of sexual harassment—that it targets those who do not conform to descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes (Glick & Rudman, 2010)—links it to harassment based on sexual orientation or heterosexist harassment (Konik & Cortina, 2008; Leskinen & Cortina, 2014). It also provides the foundation for expecting that sexual minority employees are targets of sexual harassment to a larger extent than sexual majority employees. What is not clear is how sexual minority status interacts with gender: Does being a sexual minority member heighten the risk of sexual harassment to the same extent for women and men?

Drawing extensively on previous intersectional research in the field of workplace harassment (Berdahl & Moore, 2006), there are (at least) two competing ways that we can theorize gender to interact with sexual minority status in predicting sexual harassment experiences: gender and sexual minority status as independent risk factors versus sexual minority status as a stronger risk factor for men. These expectations represent two versions of the so-called "double jeopardy” hypothesis, as outlined by Berdahl and Moore (2006), who predicted the pattern of harassment targeting members of two intersecting demographic categories (in their case gender and race/ethnicity). The first version, using our categories, is additive. In this version of the double jeopardy hypothesis, gender and sexual orientation do not interact. Sexual minority women, facing both gender-based and sexuality-based harassment, are sexually harassed at a level that equals the sum of sexual harassment targeting sexual majority women and sexual minority men. Very few studies have compared the sexual harassment experiences of the four gender-by-sexuality groups (Hajizadeh et al., 2019; Konik & Cortina, 2008; Schuyler et al., 2020), but at least one study partly supports this proposed pattern. Konik and Cortina (2008) found among university employees and academics that sexual minorities experienced more frequent gender harassment and sexualized harassment (unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion combined), but there was neither a main effect of participant gender nor an interaction between participant gender and sexual minority status.

The second version of the double jeopardy hypothesis is multiplicative (Berdahl & Moore, 2006). In this version, gender and sexual orientation are not considered as independent categories; rather, they interact and compound each other. When considering gender and ethnicity, the interactive version of the double jeopardy hypothesis holds that the disadvantage facing ethnic minority women exceeds the combined disadvantage of ethnic majority women and ethnic minority men (Berdahl & Moore, 2006). In our case, we argue that gender and sexual orientation may interact so that sexual minority status is a stronger risk factor for men than for women. In general, heterosexist prejudice target gay men more strongly than lesbian women (Hebl et al., 2010). Men are more frequently identified as harassers by targets (Cortina & Areguin, 2021; Fasting et al., 2021; Magley et al., 1999; Rambøll Management Consulting, 2020; Steinþórsdóttir & Pétursdóttir, 2017; U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, 1981, 1995), and men report more negative attitudes towards gay and bisexual men than towards lesbian and bisexual women (Anderssen et al., 2016; Bettinsoli et al., 2020; Hebl et al., 2010). Against this backdrop, the pattern may indicate that sexual minority status is a stronger risk factor for exposure to sexual harassment for sexual minority men than for sexual minority women. This does not mean that sexual minority men necessarily experience higher levels of sexual harassment than (sexual minority or majority) women but that the difference between the levels reported by sexual majority and minority men is larger than the difference between sexual majority and minority women. There is some evidence to support an interactive effect. Hajizadeh et al. (2019) found in a study of personnel in the Canadian Armed Forces that identifying as LGBT was a stronger risk factor for being sexually harassed for men than for women. Schuyler et al. (2020) found in a respondent-generated sample of U.S. military active service members that LGB men had a higher risk of having experienced sexual harassment during their service than LGB women.

Hypotheses

Against this backdrop, we propose two competing hypotheses:

  • Hypothesis 1a. Gender and sexual minority status have additive effects on sexual harassment: women have higher odds of being harassed than men and sexual minorities have higher odds of being harassed than sexual majority members. There is no interaction between gender and sexual minority status.

  • Hypothesis 1b. Gender and sexual minority status have interactive effects on sexual harassment: women have higher odds of being harassed than men and sexual minorities have higher odds of being harassed than sexual majority members. Gender and sexual minority status interact so that the difference between sexual majority and sexual minority men is larger than the difference between sexual minority women and sexual majority women.

Methods

Participants and procedure

The present study draws on data collected as part of a larger investigation targeting diversity, career opportunities, and work environment experiences in the Norwegian Police Service (NPS) A1). A detailed description of the organizational characteristics of the NPSs can be found in Bjørkelo et al. (2021). We collected the data through two surveys that in combination targeted the entire population of NPS employees. The two surveys covered a range of demographic variables and career and work environment experiences, including gender, sexual orientation, and sexual harassment. Employees in the NPS are broadly categorized into two groups: personnel who are educated as police officers and whose position involves the duties and rights associated with exercising power on behalf of the state and so-called civilian personnel who perform both core police tasks and provide support functions (e.g., digital forensics, economists, technical, HR and IT-personnel, analysts, etc.). The first survey was mailed to all police-educated personnel employed in police positions within the NPS (n = 9524) in November 2016. Their home addresses (and in a few instances work addresses for personnel whose home address could not be provided for security reasons) were provided to us by the HR-department of the Norwegian Police Directorate. We sent out an information letter, a questionnaire, and a pre-paid return envelope. In total, 2956 questionnaires were returned (response rate 31%). At the time of the survey, information about the project was posted on the NPS intranet and communicated through other relevant information channels (the Police Union magazine, the Police Leader magazine) to increase the response rate.

The second survey was conducted online between May and June 2018. We received the e-mail addresses of all employees occupying a civilian position in the NPS (N = 6156) from the Norwegian Police Directorate and collected the data via the Norwegian Centre for Research Data’s online survey tool “NSD Websurvey.” The civilian employees received an email invitation with a link to the survey as well as two reminders. A total of 1629 participated, corresponding to a 26% response rate. Again, information about the project was posted on the intranet pages of the NPS and in other relevant channels to increase participation. Both surveys were approved by the Data Protection Services at the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (project numbers 48860 and 58,485) as well as the Norwegian Police Directorate.

In this paper, we focus on the interaction between the gender categories men and women and sexual minority status operationalized as self-identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Respondents were first asked to indicate their gender with the response options “man,” “woman,” “other gender identity or gender expression,” and “I do not wish to answer.” The “other” category was intended to capture both binary trans individuals (i.e., trans men and trans women) as well as non-binary and gender fluid identities. The prefix “cis” was not in common usage in Norwegian and was therefore not explicitly stated in the survey. Our approach is highly similar to the current recommendations for assessing gender identity in Norwegian (Dalen et al., 2021). Respondents who answered “man” or “woman” were considered cisgender in this paper (see Anderssen et al., 2020 for a similar approach in the Norwegian context; Dalen et al., 2021), but we recognize that individuals with a history of gender incongruence who currently identify as men or women may also be included (Anderssen et al., 2020; Dalen et al., 2021).

The combined sample (N = 4585) consisted of 46.1% women, 53.6% men, and 0.1% who indicated “other gender identity or gender expression.” A few participants (0.15%) skipped or explicitly indicated that they did not want to answer the question about gender. Sexual minority status was inferred from a question about whether the respondent self-identified as LGBT. There have been substantial developments in the terminology of gender and sexual orientation over the last years (American Psychological Association, 2020). When the surveys from which we employ data were designed, the demographic categories were chosen to parallel those included in the action plan for diversity in the Norwegian Police Service (The Norwegian Police Directorate, 2008). The action plan grouped sexual minorities and transpersons together (i.e., LGBT employees). Because the purpose of this paper is to address sexual minority status, we excluded gender minorities—including transpersons—based on the first question about gender (see participant exclusion criteria below). Remaining respondents who self-identified as LGBT were considered sexual minorities. A total of 165 respondents indicated that they were sexual minorities of whom 111 identified as women and 54 identified as men.

Men were in the majority among police-educated respondents (65.3%) and in the minority among civilian employees (32.4%). The mean age was 42.42 years (SD = 10.15). Most respondents did not have an immigration background (i.e., were born in Norway to Norwegian parents, 91.1%), 3.9% were immigrants to Norway, 0.9% were born in Norway to immigrant parents, 2.8% had one Norwegian-born and one foreign-born parent, 1.1% had other immigration backgrounds (e.g., adopted or born abroad to Norwegian parents), and 0.1% declined to answer the question about immigration background. Compared to official statistic from Statistics Norway (Statistics Norway, 2023a, 2023b), our sample appears representative of the NPS population with respect to employee gender, immigration background and age. Details are provided in the supplementary materials (Additional file 1: SM Table 1).

Participant Exclusions

Participants who indicated “other gender identity or gender expression” (n = 5), who did not indicate their gender (n = 7), and/or did not provide information on their status as sexual majority/minority members (n = 20) were excluded. Of the remaining 4554 respondents, 95.9% had complete data across the 12 sexual harassment items described in the next section. Respondents who did not respond to at least 9 of the 12 sexual harassment items (n = 168) were excluded from all analyses. The choice of cut-off at 9 items was pragmatic. One hundred sixty-seven respondents did not answer any of the 12 sexual harassment items, and 1 respondent answered 1 item only (i.e., these respondents did not provide information about their sexual harassment experiences and were excluded). Very few (22.6%, n = 38) of the non-responders came from the police-educated sample who received the paper questionnaire at their home address. Closely paralleling the overall representation of men and women among the police-educated participants, 63.2% of the police-educated non-responders were men, and 36.8% were women. None of the 38 indicated that they were sexual minority members. The majority of the non-responders (77.4%, n = 130) came from the sample of civilian employees who received the online questionnaire via their work email. Paralleling the representation of women and men among civilian employees, 66.2% of civilian non-responders were women and 33.8% were men. Among the civilian non-responders, two indicated that they were sexual minority members. Thus, there were no indications that gender or sexual orientation influenced the pattern of non-response. However, non-response was more likely when answering online at work (civilian sample) than filling in a paper-questionnaire at home (police-educated sample). Among those who did respond, one respondent missed 3 items, and 16 respondents missed 1 item. These 17 respondents were retained in the sample. All other respondents answered all 12 items. Demographic characteristics of the analyzed sample (n = 4386) are presented in Table 1.

Table 1 Demographic characteristics of the analyzed sample
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Instruments

Sexually Harassing Behaviors

To measure exposure to sexually harassing behaviors, we adapted the Bergen Sexual Harassment Scale (BSHS; Einarsen & Sørum, 1996; Nielsen et al., 2010). The scale was adapted in two ways: we tailored the instruction to our specific sample and the items were updated to include harassment via text messages, email, and social media. The instruction to the respondents read: “Now we will ask you some questions about whether you have experienced unwanted sexual actions. We ask you to consider the last six months and actions carried out by persons in the police when answering. We are interested in behaviors that occurred at work and in work-related situations (e.g., seminars or social events).” Next, the respondents were presented with a list of behaviors ranging from unwanted comments about one’s body or appearance to sexual assault, attempted rape, and rape. The full list of items is shown in Table 2. For each of the items, the response categories were never, 1 time, 2–5 times, and more than 5 times. Gender harassment was covered by the first four items of the BSHS (i.e., items 1–4 in Table 2) and sexual advance harassment was covered by the remaining eight items (i.e., items 5–12 in Table 2), which describe both unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. Consistent with previous research on sexual minority status and sexual harassment, we focus our analysis on the dichotomous outcome of having experienced any form of sexual harassment at least once (Hajizadeh et al., 2019; Schuyler et al., 2020). This is also warranted given the highly skewed distribution of responses for most indicators of sexual harassment (i.e., the most common response is “Never,” followed by “1 time”). For the 17 respondents who missed either one or three items, their status as “not harassed” versus “harassed” was determined by their answers to the 11 (9) items they had completed. Frequencies of responses across all items and the full set of response categories are provided in the Supplementary Material (Additional file 1: SM Table 2).

Table 2 Sexual harassment items and percentage of respondents indicating the behavior at least once in the last 6 months
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Transparency and Openness

We have described our sampling plan, all data exclusions, and all measures in the study. To protect participants’ anonymity, full data from this study including all demographic information cannot be shared. A disidentified dataset containing the key variables (i.e., gender, sexual minority status, and sexual harassment) can, and will, be shared in line with the APA code of ethics Sect. 8.14a. Materials for this study are embedded in the paper and are available in Norwegian by emailing the corresponding author. Neither the study design nor the analysis plan was preregistered. All analyses were performed in IBM SPSS Statistics version 28.0.1.0, except for the figure which was created using the ggplot2 package (Wickham et al., 2016) in RStudio version 2023.12.1. Analytical code is available by contacting the first author.

Results

Descriptive Results

The overall percentage of respondents who reported being a target of sexual harassment at least once in the last 6 months was 19.9%, but this varied substantially across the four groups. A total of 46.4% (n = 51) of sexual minority women and 30.2% (n = 16) of sexual minority men reported at least one experience of sexual harassment. The percentages for sexual majority women and men were 26.9% (n = 510) and 12.8% (n = 298), respectively. The type of sexual harassment that was most common was gender harassment. At least one experience of gender harassment was reported by 44.5% (n = 49) of sexual minority women and 26.4% (n = 14) of sexual minority men. The percentages for sexual majority women and men were 22.1% (n = 420) and 11.3% (n = 262), respectively. For sexual advance harassment, 18.2% (n = 20) of sexual minority women and 5.7% (n = 3) of sexual minority men reported being targeted at least once. The corresponding figures for sexual majority women and men were 13.5% (n = 257) and 3.1% (n = 71).

Main Results

To test the two competing hypotheses about the additive versus interactive nature of the effects of gender and sexual minority status on the probability of being a target of sexual harassment, we conducted a binary logistic regression analysis. In the first step (model 1), we entered respondent gender and sexual minority status, and in the second step (model 2), we added the interaction term. The results are presented in Table 3.

The analyses showed that the interaction term between gender and sexual minority status was not significant; OR = 0.80, 95% CI [0.39, 1.63]. Rather, as shown in model 1 in Table 3, we found that gender, OR = 2.48, 95% CI [2.12, 2.89], and sexual minority status, OR = 2.51, 95% CI [1.81, 3.48], had independent effects on sexual harassment. This is consistent with hypothesis 1a of additive effects. In Fig. 1, we have plotted the proportions reporting sexually harassment in the last 6 months across the four groups. This proportion plot is consistent with an interpretation of our results as indicating an additive effect.

Table 3 Logistic regression analysis predicting being a target of sexual harassment in the last 6 months
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Plot of proportions and confidence intervals of employees indicating being a target of sexual harassment in the last 6 months across groups

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Our analysis of non-responders to the sexual harassment items indicated that civilian employees (who received an online questionnaire at work) were more likely to be non-responders than police-educated participants (who received a paper questionnaire at home). We cannot know if this difference is related to factors associated with being a civilian or police-educated, but the most plausible interpretation is that people are more likely to be interrupted (e.g., by colleagues, meetings, phone calls, etc.) when answering online at work and discontinue their participation. The sexual harassment items were located towards the end of the survey and most of the civilian non-responders had left the questionnaire prior to the sexual harassment items being presented. In the supplementary materials, we report a logistic regression analysis with sample (police-educated versus civilian employee) as a covariate. Adding sample as a covariate did not change the substantive results of our main analyses.

Discussion

We started from two competing perspectives on the nature of the relationship between gender and sexual minority status in experiences of sexual harassment representing two versions of the double jeopardy hypothesis (Berdahl & Moore, 2006): gender and sexual minority status as independent risk factors (additive effects) versus sexual minority status as a stronger risk factor for men (interactive effects). In line with previous research among university employees and academics (Konik & Cortina, 2008), we found an additive effect of gender and sexual minority status on being a target of harassment in the Norwegian Police Service. Women and sexual minorities had higher odds of being targeted than men and sexual majority employees. In terms of the overall levels of sexual harassment, sexual minority women were the most exposed group, followed by sexual minority men and sexual majority women.

Contrary to the interactive effects hypothesis, we did not find that sexual minority status was a stronger risk factor for men. Previous evidence pointing to an interactive effect comes from military samples (Hajizadeh et al., 2019; Schuyler et al., 2020). Thus, it is possible that sexual minority status is a stronger risk factor for sexual harassment for men only in military contexts. However, it is also important to note two important differences between the present and previous studies. Hajizadeh et al. (2019) included transpersons in their sexual/gender minority group. It cannot be ruled out that a higher exposure to harassment among trans men was driving the stronger effect of LGBT status for men than for women. The respondents in Schuyler et al. (2020) reported a very high frequency of exposure to harassment during service (67.4% in the total sample). For women, they may have observed a ceiling effect; if practically all women reported sexual harassment, then there was little room for a difference between sexual minority and majority women. Schuyler et al. (2020) also report that most sexual minorities had experienced sexual harassment (80.7%). The interaction—the difference in the difference—would then indicate that sexual minority status is a stronger risk factor for sexual minority men, because sexual majority men is the only group in which not “everybody” is harassed. This means that interplay between gender and sexual minority status in predicting exposure to sexual harassment must be understood considering the overall levels of exposure to sexual harassment in a sample.

That said, the effect size for the interaction between gender and sexual minority status (OR = 0.80, 95% CI [0.39, 1.63]) was too small to be significant in our sample. The power of the test of the interaction is determined by several factors (Baranger et al., 2023; Cramer, 1999; Faul et al., 2009), but key issues are the size of the sexual minority sample and the (low) probability of harassment as an outcome. For the interpretation of our results, this means that we cannot rule out the existence of a small interactive effect also in our population. This limitation is difficult to overcome when studying rare events and how they are predicted by belonging to numerically small groups unless targeting either extremely large organizations (e.g., military organizations) or sampling respondents across organizations. While caution is warranted in stating the absence of an interactive effect, we maintain that our results are a valuable addition to the very scarce research on how sexual minority status affects the risk of sexual harassment for women and men.

In line with previous intersectional approaches to harassment (Berdahl & Moore, 2006), we also document the double jeopardy facing minority women. The model of stereotyping through associated and intersectional categories (MOASIC) developed by Hall et al. (2019) emphasize that perceivers integrate stereotypes from both foundational categories (e.g., woman) and what they term intersectional (e.g., sexual orientation) and associated categories (e.g., “man" in the case of lesbian women). Using lesbian women as an example, perceivers would see lesbian women as less prototypical of the category “women” than heterosexual women, because the stereotype of “women” is diluted by the associated category of “men” for lesbian, but not heterosexual, women. Hall et al. (2019) propose that low prototypicality goes along with perceivers being more tolerant of violations of proscribed behaviors and having lower expectations of prescribed behaviors. While this likely also holds for the intersection of gender and sexual orientation (e.g., a higher tolerance of assertiveness in lesbian versus heterosexual women; Hudson & Ghani, 2024), our results at the same time indicate that non-prototypicality is punished.

In line with the theoretical arguments put forth by Berdahl (2007a, 2007b), we found that individuals who violate prescriptive gender norms (in our case sexual minorities) are more likely targeted by sexual harassment. Recent experimental research showed that people who mentally represented sexual harassment targets as prototypical women were less likely to perceive ambiguous sexual advance behaviors as sexual harassment when targeting non-prototypical (but heterosexual) women and believed non-prototypical (heterosexual) women were less credible and less harmed by sexual advance harassment than prototypical women (Goh et al., 2022). Non-heterosexuality is also a way to diverge from the prototype of women, and it is likely that sexual minority women are perceived by others as more unlikely targets, as less credible, and less harmed by the sexual advance harassment they do experience (Kaiser et al., 2022). Because men are less prototypical victims of sexual harassment, they too are likely to face the obstacles posed to non-prototypical women targeted by sexual harassment (Kaiser et al., 2022). Whether and how sexual orientation plays a role in the perception of men who are targeted by sexual harassment is an interesting avenue for future work. From a theoretical perspective, Hershcovis et al. (2021) emphasize the role social networks play in shaping sexual harassment and the (lack of) consequences for harassers. Future research could combine these theoretical insights with research on sexual minorities’ social networks at work to understand whether sexual minorities are targeted more often by sexually harassers not only due to gender norm violations but also due to less favorable social network positions.

Recent research has addressed drop-out from the Norwegian Police University College and turnover among police-educated personnel in the Norwegian Police Service using high-quality registry data (Alecu & Fekjær, 2020; Fekjær & Alecu, 2022). They find a small but robust effect of higher drop-out and turn-over among women and students/employees with immigrant backgrounds. Whether sexual minorities are also more likely to exit police education and the NPS is still an open question. However, sexual harassment has been linked to job withdrawal (Willness et al., 2007), and the higher levels of sexual harassment reported by sexual minority members in our sample may potentially contribute to them leaving the NPS at higher rates than their sexual majority colleagues.

Limitations

It is important to acknowledge that we have approached intersectionality from a quantitative perspective and studied the effects of belonging to different combinations of social categories, specifically focusing on additive and multiplicative effects of gender and sexual orientation on sexual harassment. As argued by Else-Quest and Hyde (2016, p. 162), these differ from what they term intersectional effects, which “may differ in their quality or form such that an intersectional location may give rise to distinct phenomena.” For example, whereas our work suggest that sexual majority women and sexual minority men are targeted by sexual harassment to a similar extent, this should not be taken to suggest that we claim that the nature or experience of that harassment is the same for sexual majority women and sexual minority men. The items used to measure sexual harassment are sufficiently broad to cover a range of experiences, and we would for example expect that the content of harassing comments differs as a function of both gender and sexual orientation. Qualitative research is one way forward to understand nuances in harassment experiences across gender and sexual orientation. Another possibility is to investigate group differences at the item level. For example, based on the pattern of responses in Table 2, sexual minority men appear to be more at risk for experiencing unwanted comments with sexual content (e.g., jokes or sexist remarks) and having sexual rumors spread about them compared to sexual majority men. Sexual minority women appear to be targeted more than sexual majority women with unwanted comments, unsolicited pictures, and unwanted physical contact with sexual undertones. In samples comprising more sexual minority employees, such patterns could be explored.

We have also limited our focus to a subset of sexual minorities (i.e., lesbian women, gay men, and bisexual women and men) and to people with a binary gender identity as either men or women. People who violate gendered expectations in other ways, such as nonbinary individuals, are also likely to be more at risk for exposure to sexual harassment. However, this is difficult to assess through surveys within a single organizational context (unless the organization is very large) because of the low prevalence of individuals who identify outside the gender binary (0.4% in the Norwegian population; Dalen et al., 2021).

Conclusion and Future Directions

Based on our results, we highlight three key implications and paths forward. First, contrary to previous research in military contexts, our study indicated that being a sexual minority member increases the odds of being exposed to sexual harassment similarly for men and women. This indicates that how gender and sexual minority status intersect in the prediction of sexual harassment likely varies across organizational contexts and overall harassment levels and should be studied in a diversity of organizational settings. Strong conclusions about the interplay between sexual orientation and gender in the prediction of sexual harassment, however, can only be drawn from very large samples as most organizations will have a low number of sexual minority employees and sexual harassment is a rare event in the statistical sense. Second, we find that sexual minorities are more exposed to sexual harassment also in Norway—a national context characterized by gender equality and legal rights and protections for LGBT individuals. High levels of gender equality and legal protection of sexual minorities do not seem to cancel out the effects that violations of gender ideals or gender non-prototypicality have on the likelihood of being harassed. Third, although the sexual harassment training literature is hampered by methodological challenges, there is evidence that training can have positive effects across several outcomes (Roehling & Huang, 2018; Roehling et al., 2022). However, Danna et al. (2020) argue that training content generally does not reflect the organizational reality of higher exposure among minority groups such as sexual minorities. An intersectional approach to sexual harassment should not be limited to exposure as in our work but also extend to training and prevention.