Like the ABC-Post survey, NBC and the Wall Street Journal shared a single survey commissioned from Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies. The survey in question was conducted from October 23rd - 26th, but appears to be part of an on-going series of surveys on a variety topics. Questions 21, 22a, 22b, 22c, and 22d on pages 13-15 are related to sexual harassment and sex discrimination in the workplace. The survey interviewed 900 adults. However, the questions about sexual harassment in the workplace were only asked to the 265 working women and 286 employed men who took the survey according to the Wall Street Journal. That isn't a very impressive sample size.
I still wouldn't necessarily call those numbers insignificant if this was a more serious survey. But it's mostly a joke. Victimization questions are too sloppy to take the data seriously. The question about supposed sexual victimization is too vaguely defined or rather not defined at all. An "unwelcome sexual advance" could just be being politely asked out once by a co-worker. Inappropriate? Maybe. But I don't think we need to start rioting in the streets about it. Also an "unwelcome sexual advance" could even be something more vague, subjective or unintentional. Is your co-worker actually hitting on you or just platonically offering you ride home?
The question about being paid less than a man isn't necessarily even about sex discrimination. Notice the survey taker is being asked if "a woman" is being paid less than "a man". This could be interpreted as being paid less than men in general or being paid less than a specific man, in which case this might be simple favoritism and not sex discrimination. It's also possible the survey taker is ignoring a host of other considerations, such as experience on the job, quality of work, etc. In addition, employees don't often share their salary information with their co-workers so the survey taker may be making assumptions of a co-worker's salary.
Thinking your viewpoint wasn't considered because of your gender seems like a very subjective event to me. Was you gender really the reason? Was your viewpoint really not considered?
At least the NBC/WSJ made some effort to establish a timeline for "unwelcome sexual advances". Unfortunately, the timeline is largely useless because it uses large and inconsistent time brackets so we can't tell if "unwelcome sexual advances" are going up or down. Survey takers are asked if the unwelcome sexual advance occurred within about 1 year, 2-5 years, 6-10 years, 10-20 years or more than 20 years ago. It's also unclear how the survey would deal with someone reporting multiple sexual advances over different time brackets.
The rest of the questions are merely opinion questions about sexual harassment (still undefined) in the workplace. As I've explained before, I'm not very interested in opinion questions, since they often don't reflect actual victimization but rather the fear created from a decades long sexual assault moral panic.
It is interesting to note that women and men have similar responses to the opinion questions. However, it's more important to note that male victims are largely excluded from the opinion questions and completely excluded from all victimization questions. The only survey question that even hints as possibly allowing male victims is when it asks survey takers if they agree with the following statement:
"These stories get a lot of attention, but sexual harassment and discrimination are rare in the workplace."It's possible that respondents could also be considering sexual harassment and discrimination against men when responding. However, keep in the mind the "stories" the survey is referring to are described as "issues related to how women are treated in society, including sexual harassment and other unfair treatment in the workplace." Also, the survey should really have written "gender discrimination" to eliminate responses related to other forms of discrimination (racial, sexual orientation, religious, etc).
Unlike the ABC/Post survey, the NBC/WSJ at least allows the possibility of female perpetrators against women by not explicitly gendering the perpetrator in its victimization questions. Unfortunately, there was no effort identify the gender of alleged perpetrators. I'm guessing the unspoken assumption is these un-gendered perpetrators are male by default. NBC and Wall Street Journal certainly made no effort to explain otherwise. In its article explaining the survey, NBC News lead with discussion of #Metoo and the Weinstein accusations. It wrote, "[m]any women speaking out - and many men looking inward", implying that men were doing soul searching about the crimes of their gender. Again, for all we know all of these vague advances of a "sexual nature" may have been committed by pushy lesbians.
Like the ABC/Post survey, the NBC/WSJ survey is not a serious attempt to research sexual harassment in the U.S.A. There is no excuse for ignoring the possibility of male victims, especially when you are already interviewing men anyway. The survey creators actually produced more work for themselves (creating two sets of questions) just so they could specifically ignore male victims. This wasn't about the truth, but about feeding the popular #MeToo narrative of professional men victimizing women who dare step foot into the professional world.
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