S9 Ep49: Combatting sexual harassment in the military

Norwegian conscripts arrive at boot camp straight out of school. They are assigned at random to a shared room and they live in it for the next eight weeks. Whatever the culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it.

We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents.

Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a poor record. It can even inspire a backlash. Instead, they included two pieces of information in a 20-minute enrolment survey. One fact was about how women score on the army's own end-of-service assessments. The other was about what last year's recruits really thought about crude sexual jokes. Eight weeks later, the researchers came back to see what had changed for the 949 recruits.

The research behind this episode:

Olle Folke, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild A. Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Targeting Attitudes to Combat Sexual Harassment: A Randomized Intervention in the Norwegian Military." CEPR Discussion Paper 21475. The discussion paper is gated. It is also published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Combatting sexual harassment in the military." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Johanna Rickne is Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University, and holds part-time chairs at the University of Nottingham and the Stockholm School of Economics. She is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans labour economics, political economics and gender economics, with sustained work on sexual harassment as a workplace hazard, on who ends up in political office, and on what makes work meaningful. She won the Assar Lindbeck Medal in 2023.

Research cited in this episode

The Sexual Experiences Questionnaire is the behavioural instrument used to measure prevalence here. Rather than asking people whether they were sexually harassed, a term that different people read very differently, it presents a list of specific behaviours and asks whether each one happened. The version used in Norway runs to 14 items and is adapted from the questionnaire developed for the US military.

Gender harassment is one of three categories in the standard model of sexual harassment, alongside unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. It covers hostile or demeaning conduct based on someone's sex or gender that is not necessarily sexual in nature, including remarks that a person is not suited to the job. In this boot camp it was the most common behaviour reported by women.

Backlash from compliance training is the reason the intervention avoids looking like training at all. Mark Roehling, Dongyuan Wu, Mahl Geum Choi and James Dulebohn's 2022 meta-analysis in Personnel Psychology gathers the evidence on what harassment training does and does not shift; other studies find that employees most inclined to harass become more tolerant of the behaviour after being told how to behave. Voluntary sessions have the opposite problem, in that those employees do not turn up.

Misperceived social norms supply the mechanism for the second piece of information. Leonardo Bursztyn, Alessandra Gonzalez and David Yanagizawa-Drott's study of Saudi Arabian husbands showed that men privately supported their wives working outside the home while badly underestimating how many other men agreed; correcting the misperception changed what those men did. The boot camp version asks recruits what their predecessors thought about sexualised jokes, then tells them the answer.

The Norwegian Armed Forces service statement is the source of the first piece of information. Recruits are assessed at the end of service on leadership, responsibility, collaboration, professional competence and judgement. Average scores show no gender gap; the graph was shown to the treated recruits in this experiment.

The vignette holds the harassment event constant across everyone who answers. Recruits read a short scenario set in a room like their own and rate six statements about it, covering whether the conduct counts as harassment, what the woman should do, and what any bystanders owe her. Because the incident is fixed, differences in the answers cannot be explained away by differences in what people happened to experience.

Sexual harassment and gender inequality is the wider agenda this episode sits inside. Olle Folke and Johanna Rickne's 2022 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics uses Swedish survey and administrative data to show that harassment risk falls hardest on whichever sex is in the minority in a workplace, and that it pushes people out of jobs.

More VoxTalks Economics episodes

Violence against women in politics. Gianmarco Daniele on why women who win office in Italy are far more likely than men to be attacked, and what that does to who stands for election in the first place.

Violence against women at work. Abi Adams-Prassl on Finnish police records linked to employment data, and what happens to the careers of the victim and the perpetrator after one colleague assaults another.

Related reading on VoxEU.org

Discrimination in work conditions: The case of sexual harassment, a VoxEU column by Johanna Rickne and Olle Folke arguing that economists should treat sexual harassment as gender discrimination in working conditions, and showing that both men and women carry the risk when they are the gender minority.