Karmini Sharma on how empathy-led training can curb sexual harassment in India

How did your research on sexual harassment training come about?

I come from Delhi, which is known to be an unsafe city for women. It was clear that women's everyday lives, especially their mobility, were severely restricted because of this issue. For example, after 19.30, you rarely see women outside the home because it isn't safe for them to move around freely. So, women's safety and mobility have always been issues that I have been concerned about.

I was working on my PhD around the same time that the #MeToo movement started in India, so there was a lot of information on sexual harassment. I already had a strong interest in this topic, so I read up on existing research and started formulating my questions on how sexual harassment could be effectively addressed through awareness training. While there was some literature on the effects of sexual harassment on economic outcomes, we knew next to nothing about what can help prevent sexual harassment. 

The timing was perfect because large funders started to pivot resources towards projects on sexual harassment. I partnered with Safecity, an NGO that has pioneered the study of sexual harassment. They helped develop the training materials and, as an established organisation, were also helpful in connecting me with universities to deliver the training.

How does your study contribute to or innovate beyond the existing literature on sexual harassment training?

There have been a few social psychology papers that have looked at the impact of various trainings on attitudes to sexual harassment, but none, to my knowledge, study the effects of such training on actual sexual harassment, so that's where this paper innovates over existing literature. 

After providing the training to the men, I asked the women in their classes about incidents of sexual harassment from men in their classes/peer groups. I was then able to connect the training with actual outcomes of sexual harassment from those men, as experienced by the women, rather than relying on the men's self-reported changes in attitude or awareness, which is what the rest of the literature has been doing.

Another key innovation of the paper was an empathy-led approach to delivering the training. I wanted the men to have a deeper understanding of the impact sexual harassment has on women. It's not just a joke or simple brush against a woman's body, but has far-reaching effects that can affect their everyday lives, like mental health, mobility, and perception of sexual harassment risk.

I collected anonymised stories from the women in the same classes as the men who received the training, asking them to share in their own words their experiences of sexual harassment and how it affected them in the long term.

Safecity then shared these stories with the men during the training and facilitated discussion.

Sharing women's experiences made the men more receptive to the training, as they connected the training with real-life experiences of the women in their class.

How did this empathy-led awareness training cause a reduction in reported incidences of sexual harassment? 

Men's awareness of sexual harassment increases in the short term, three to four months after the training, and remains high in the long term, two to three years after the training.

But the most powerful factor that reduced reported incidences of sexual harassment as a result of the training was men's perception of their peers. Seeing how their peers talked about and engaged with the topic of sexual harassment enabled them to update their own beliefs and behaviours (what we call second order beliefs) about others. I find that they were more likely to think that their peers will more likely support a victim and call out "inappropriate behaviours" after the training. This was persistently the case in the short and long run. 

Although awareness is still critical in reducing sexual harassment, the potential of men's social environment remains an important factor in bringing about real change in their behaviour. A lot of focus groups and talking to men later confirmed this hypothesis as well.

And this doesn't just apply to sexual harassment; it can be for homophobia, racism, bullying or any other form of harassment. 

How has the training benefited the women's career opportunities and engagement with the labour market?

The paper was not designed to examine the impact on the labour market outcomes, but I saw that women were more likely to search for a job after the training than to go on to further education. Why this was the case is still an open question; it could be that they felt more empowered due to the training, but further research is needed. The next step in the study is to follow up with the women, examine their presence on online labour market platforms, and see what kinds of companies they work for. In fact, this is exactly what I am doing now.

How are your research findings advancing the conversation around sexual harassment training?

Yes, it definitely has. This paper is proof that empathy-led awareness training can effectively reduce the incidence of sexual harassment and provides insights into what mechanisms make it work. The paper has been recognised by Institute for What Works to Advance Gender Equality (IWWAGE) and also received the best student paper award at the Australian Gender Economics Workshop 2021.

I'm making the case for organisations to make more effort in delivering sexual harassment training with care. Leading with empathy to build awareness ensures its effectiveness rather than merely treating it as a check-box exercise.

This Q and A discusses findings from Karmini Sharma’s working paper on Tackling Sexual Harassment: Short and Long-run Experimental Evidence from India (September 2024), funded by JPAL (Crime and Violence Initiative, formerly Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and University of Warwick).