Bad for Business

Awarded with the Ruprecht-Karls-Preis 2025

Bad for Business examines the evolution of workplace sexual harassment from a feminist civil rights issue to a corporately managed concern over four decades of U.S. history. It analyzes the feminist, social conservative, and management frames that shaped public discourse, corporate policies, and legal rulings. Highlighting the unintended consequences of deferring authority to employers, the book reveals how economic priorities overshadowed the fight against systemic, gendered inequities in the workplace. In many cases corporate internal anti-harassment measures intensified managerial control over employees and rather than alleviating it, often increased the likelihood of sex discrimination in the workplace. In its conclusion, the study considers how these developments solidified a culture of silence surrounding the issue of sexual harassment, which sparked the #MeToo movement. Four decades after feminists first coined the term sexual harassment, it took a new generation of "silence breakers" to demand change.