Contextualizing Latina Experiences of Sexual Harassment: Preliminary Tests of a Structural Model

This study integrates findings from the Latin cultural literature and past sexual harassment research into a culturally relevant model of the sexual harassment process, framed by cognitive theories of stress and appraisal. Specifically, within a community sample of 184 harassed Latinas, we assessed both universal and culturally salient factors related to targets, perpetrators, harassing behaviors, and organizational contexts. Path analyses then suggested relations between these factors and Latinas’ phenomenological experiences of sexual harassment. Further, the more experientially severe the sexual harassment, the more that Latinas reported job dissatisfaction, organizational withdrawal, psychosomatic symptoms, and life dissatisfaction. In sum, this project contextualized the sexual harassment process by identifying sociocultural determinants of its impact on Latina working women.