GENDER

10.1177/0891243205282785
Welsh et al.&/ SOCIETY
HARASSMENT
/ February
ACROSS
2006 RACE AND CITIZENSHIP

“I’M NOT THINKING OF IT AS

SEXUAL HARASSMENT”
Understanding Harassment across
Race and Citizenship

SANDY WELSH
University of Toronto
JACQUIE CARR
Independent Researcher
BARBARA MACQUARRIE
University of Western Ontario
AUDREY HUNTLEY
Independent Researcher

How do diverse groups of women in Canada define sexual harassment? To answer this ques-
tion requires incorporating race and citizenship into the analysis of sexual harassment. The
authors use data from seven focus groups of Canadian women. The white women with full cit-
izenship rights most easily identify with existing legal understandings of sexual harassment
and believe they have the right to report their harassment. For women of color and women
without full citizenship rights, issues of racialized sexual harassment emerge as central fac-
tors in their harassment experience. Black women with full citizenship rights call into ques-
tion whether the term sexual harassment captures their experiences. Filipinas working as
live-in caregivers on limited visas demonstrate how racism and lack of citizenship changes
definitions of sexual harassment. Their experiences of harassment combine elements of iso-
lation due to their lack of citizenship, racialized sexual harassment, and abuse. The authors
argue that intersectional analyses are needed to understand women’s harassment experi-
ences and their ability to complain and seek legal recourse.

Keywords: sexual harassment; race; citizenship; intersectionality

O ne frequently discussed problem in the research on sexual harassment

is that women will report experiencing unwanted sexual attention but
will not label those experiences as sexual harassment. This phenomenon
has led some to focus on the gap between objective and subjective percep-
tions of harassment or the likelihood respondents will label their experi-
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 20 No. 1, February 2006 87-107
DOI: 10.1177/0891243205282785
© 2006 Sociologists for Women in Society
87

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88 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

ences as sexual harassment (Vaux 1993; Williams 1997). Most sexual

harassment research complicates this issue because it is conducted on white
women (who are predominately heterosexual with full citizenship rights
and a variety of class backgrounds). Although some have recently studied
the experiences of women of color (Cortina 2001; Kalof et al. 2001; Texeira
2002), there is need for more attention to how women define sexual harass-
ment through the intersection of race, gender, and citizenship. This inter-
sectionality may explain why some women do not define their experiences
as sexual harassment.
This study is concerned with the way women talk about and define sexual
and workplace harassment. While some may argue it is the legal definition
of harassment that matters, we believe it is important not to be constrained
by this definition. In the specific case of sexual harassment, women who
experience racialized harassment alongside sexual harassment (or do not
define their sexual harassment as “sexual” but as about race) do not fit
within our legal conception of sexual harassment.
This analysis examines how race and citizenship complicate women’s
definitions of sexual harassment while utilizing past research on inter-
sectionality to move our arguments forward. While others have incorpo-
rated racialized processes into their harassment research (Texeira 2002), we
move beyond these to demonstrate how citizenship also shapes the meaning
of sexual harassment. Using focus group from a participatory action
research project, we argue that race and citizenship are present in women’s
definitions of harassment. Before presenting our analysis, we begin with a
brief discussion of the theoretical issues concerning intersectionality fol-
lowed by previous research on the relationship between race, citizenship,
and sexual harassment.

AUTHORS’ NOTE: Research was supported by Status of Women Canada. We thank the
Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres and the now-defunct Workers Information and
Action Centre of the City of Toronto for their support and sponsorship of this research. With-
out the participation of the women in our study, this research would not be possible. We also
thank Linn Clark, Cynthia Cranford, Bonnie Fox, Kelly Hannah-Moffat, Anna-Maria Mar-
shall, Michael Schreiner, Judy Taylor, and the Gender & Society editors and reviewers for
insightful comments on earlier drafts. An earlier version of this article was presented at the
2001 American Sociological Association meetings.
REPRINT REQUESTS: Sandy Welsh, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725
Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2J4; phone: (416) 978-5290; e-mail:
welsh@chass.utoronto.ca.

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 89

INTERLOCKING SYSTEMS OF DOMINATION

Attention to the intersecting nature of race and gender enhances our

understanding of labor market outcomes and experiences, including sexual
harassment (Browne and Misra 2003). Scholars have demonstrated both
theoretically and empirically that race, class, and gender intersect in a
unique process that would be missed if each were analyzed separately (Col-
lins 1990; Nakano Glenn 2000b; West and Fenstermaker 1995). Yet “what
this ‘distinct result’ looks like continues to be a challenge for intersection-
ality theorizing” (Stasiulis 1999, 355). Our research attempts to describe
this “distinct result” in the context of sexual harassment in the workplace by
focusing on the intersecting dimensions of race and citizenship in diverse
women’s definitions of harassment.
Sexual harassment, like rape and other forms of sexual violence, is
embedded in an interlocking system of race, gender, and citizenship. As
Razak notes, when rape is discussed in court or other arenas, “the rape script
is thus inevitably raced whether it involves intraracial or interracial rape”
for “race never absents itself from the rape script” (1998, 68-69). For exam-
ple, the rape of Black women by Black or white men is taken less seriously
by the criminal justice system than the rape of white women. The same can
be said for sexual harassment—race and citizenship are never absent. What
is often overlooked in analyses of sexual harassment is how they represent a
set of interlocking social arrangements. To answer the question of how
diverse women define sexual harassment, it is necessary to focus on the
interlocking nature of race and citizenship. To do this, we first discuss
research on race and sexual harassment and then turn to the issue of
citizenship.

Racialized Processes and Sexual Harassment

Several sexual harassment overviews comment on the paucity of research

concerning sexual harassment, race, and ethnicity (Welsh 1999; Williams,
Giuffre, and Dellinger 2004). A few early empirical studies found no over-
all difference in harassment rates for women of color and white women
(Gutek 1985; U.S. Merit System Protection Board 1981). On the other
hand, some evidence exists that women of color experience more severe
forms of sexual harassment (Gruber and Bjorn 1982).
Recent studies use the terms gendered racism or racialized sexual
harassment to describe how the harassment experiences of women of
color are not simply about sexual discrimination that involves race (e.g.,

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90 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

Banneriji 1995; Buchanan and Ormerod 2002; Texeira 2002). Mansfield

et al.’s (1991) study of women in blue-collar occupations found that African
American tradeswomen experienced gender and racial harassment. Yoder
and Aniakudo (1996) provide some evidence that gender and racial harass-
ment are intertwined for African American women firefighters. Although
they focus most of their analysis on gender, their respondents consistently
refused to distinguish between race and gender as the source of their differ-
ential treatment. In the words of one respondent, “it’s hard to say whether it
was just specifically because I was Black. With it being a double edge:
being Black and being female” (Yoder and Aniakudo 1996, 266). Mecca
and Rubin’s (1999) analysis of African American women university stu-
dents found that half of their sample perceived racial differences between
their experiences and the experiences of Caucasian women. Comments
about racially based features and racially based stereotypes that label Afri-
can American women as promiscuous were found to be sexually harassing.
These studies highlight the need to attend more closely to how race inter-
plays with gender when trying to understand how women interpret sexual
behaviors in the workplace.
Banneriji’s (1995) case study of “X,” a Black woman working in a Cana-
dian manufacturing environment, demonstrates the complexity and the
potential of applying an intersectional framework to sexual harassment. X,
a 45-year-old Black woman and sole-support mother, experienced harass-
ment in her workplace that combined racism and sexual harassment. She
was subjected to “obscene pictures of Black women sexually servicing men
placed at her worksite” and to coworkers’ referring to her as “cunt” and “a
fucking bitch.” Yet the racism experienced by X and other women of color is
often ignored in discussions of the sexual harassment of women. Building
on this work, we incorporate an explicit focus on how race affects women’s
definitions of harassment.

Citizenship Status and Sexual Harassment

Past research on sexual harassment makes citizenship invisible by focus-

ing on citizens living in their country of origin. We argue that citizenship
status is a visible and complicating component of women’s definitions of
sexual harassment. Hondagneu-Sotelo’s examination of undocumented
Latina domestic workers is an example of how “citizenship or legal status is
a significant analytic category that might fruitfully be incorporated in our
analyses of women’s employment” (1997, 104; see also Arat-Koc 2001;
Nakano Glenn 2000a). She finds the harassment, intimidation, and isola-

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 91

tion experienced by these immigrant women workers is made worse by

their undocumented status. Some women report living like prisoners in
their employers’ homes, having no friends, and being threatened that their
employer will turn them in to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
This analysis builds on Hondagneu-Sotelo (1997) and others by incorpo-
rating citizenship or legal status into the analysis of sexual harassment
(Nakano Glenn 2000a). Although the historical development of citizenship
rights is beyond the scope of this article, it does provide a context for under-
standing where women are situated in the nexus of race, gender, and citizen-
ship and for how they understand and react to the sexual harassment they
experience. The Canadian foreign domestic workers in our study arrive in
Canada through the government-sponsored Live-in Caregiver program and
must spend two years living in the home of their employer. These women
are in Canada on temporary work visas, which limit their citizenship rights
and access to legal redress. By explicitly incorporating citizenship in this
analysis, we hope to challenge assumptions of past research that operated
within a framework of equal citizenship and full access to legal redress
mechanisms.
To answer the question of how diverse groups of women in Canada
define sexual harassment, we draw on focus group data from a larger study
of women’s harassment experiences. The analysis begins with a discussion
of white women with full citizenship rights. This is followed by an analysis
of how the women of color and women without full citizenship rights define
sexual harassment. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of what our find-
ings mean for definitions of harassment.

DATA COLLECTION AND METHOD

We derive data for this analysis from focus groups collected as part of a
participatory action research project in the province of Ontario, Canada.
Focus groups were held in the summer and fall of 2000 and throughout
2002. For both time periods, participants were selected based on purposive
sampling to allow us to refine our understanding of the intersection of race,
citizenship, disability, sexuality, living in isolated rural areas, and class with
women’s experiences of sexual harassment. Six focus groups were com-
pleted in 2000 with Black women, Filipinas, white women in unionized
male-dominated manufacturing settings (two groups), mixed-race women
employed by the federal government, and a mixed-race sexual harassment
support group. These groups were chosen in an attempt not to achieve a rep-
resentative sample of workplace harassment experiences but to clarify and

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92 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

compare how race/ethnicity, class, and citizenship status intersected with

sexual harassment. Participants were found in a variety of ways, including
community organizations and snowball sampling through existing con-
tacts. Focus groups were facilitated by a team of community and academic
researchers based in London, Toronto, and Ottawa, Ontario (see Table 1 for
information on focus groups members and facilitators).
Based on the analysis of the focus groups collected in 2000, it was clear
that more focus groups were needed to clarify issues of race/ethnicity, class,
and citizenship. Also in these focus groups, women discussed issues of sex-
uality, age, English as a second language, and disability as well as the
effects these had on their harassment experiences. Their conversations
about these aspects led to our second phase of data collection in 2002.
Groups were selected to focus on citizenship, race, language, class, sexual-
ity, and disability. We completed focus groups of Filipina domestic work-
ers, First Nations (Native) women, white women with disabilities, white
women living in rural areas, white lesbians, and young women. While these
focus groups do not capture all the ways in which race, citizenship, and
other aspects of women’s lives intersect with their harassment experiences,
it did allow us to explore a variety of ways in which women’s identities
interconnect with their workplace harassment. Similar to the first phase of
the study, women were contacted through a combination of contacts with
community agencies and snowball sampling. Women who participated in
our study received a thank you note and a small gift, a pin commemorating
an Ontario woman who was killed by a sexual harasser. These women also
received a copy of our report at the end of the study.
Focus groups were used because they are an ideal way to allow women to
share their experiences and to debate definitions of harassment (Morgan
1997). The focus group method also fit with our participatory action
research model. This method allowed us to collect data while giving women
a safe forum to receive support for their experiences. For space purposes,
we focus this article on the groups that highlighted race and citizenship
issues. While race and citizenship issues are present in all the groups, for
some, it emerged as key to understanding their experiences. This analytic
choice allows for more depth in the analysis. Despite our exclusion of the
focus groups on lesbian women, Native women, women with disabilities,
young women, and women in rural areas, these focus groups inform the
emergent theoretical framework presented here.1 Table 1 lists the seven
focus groups included in the analysis for this article.
Because our exploration of topics in the focus groups was relatively
broad, we had loose criteria for who could be included. Women who
believed they had experienced sexual harassment or other forms of work-

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 TABLE 1: Characteristics of Seven Focus Groups Included in the Analysis (N = 35)

Race/Ethnicity
Focus Number in of Focus Citizenship General Occupational Race/Ethnicity
Group Group Group Members Status Characteristics of Facilitators

Black women Five African Canadian Full citizenship rights Professional, Black, white
semiprofessional
Filipina group I Four Filipino Less than full Professional, Filipino, white
citizenship rights domestic workers
White union women I Six White Full citizenship rights Manufacturing White, white
White union women II Three White Full citizenship rights Manufacturing White, white
Federal workers Five Four white, Four with full citizenship Professional, service, White, white
one Asian rights; one had less skilled trade
than full, now has full
citizenship rights
Sexual harassment Nine Seven white, Full citizenship rights Professional, Black, white
a
support group two women of color semiprofessional,
service

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Filipina group II Three Filipina Less than full Domestic workers Mixed First
citizenship rights Nations/
German, white

a. The facilitators did not record the race/ethnicity of the women to protect their confidentiality.

93
94 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

place harassment or were interested in talking about harassment (we did not
want to force women to label their experiences) were invited to attend.
Although one could argue that strict criteria for “having experienced sexual
harassment” might have been ideal, we believe that it was our loose criteria
that allowed the intersectionality of race and citizenship to emerge as cen-
tral for understanding sexual and workplace harassment.
Two members of the research team facilitated each focus group session.
Focus groups opened with a general discussion of what women thought
about sexual harassment and whether they knew anything about it. This
opener was followed by topics that included what women’s experiences
were with sexual harassment and other forms of workplace discrimination;
whether women had reported these experiences; if so, what they had experi-
enced; and what were the consequences of experiencing harassment. Dis-
cussions were tape-recorded and then transcribed by a member of the
research team. Data were analyzed for emerging themes using Nvivo. We
base our analysis on the data from seven focus groups (N = 35) listed in
Table 1.
One limitation of our study concerns the comparability of the focus
groups. First, there are issues of race and citizenship that make certain
groups distinct. While focus groups design requires that groups be homoge-
neous (e.g., Krueger 2000), this does limit the generalizability of the sam-
ple. Second, some women in our study identify themselves as experiencing
sexual harassment while others do not identify themselves in that way.
Third, some women reported their workplace harassment. On one hand, the
women in our study capture some of the range of women’s experiences with
sexual and workplace harassment. On the other hand, we cannot generalize
these particular women’s experiences to all women. What we can do is use
these data to answer our question of how diverse women define harassment.
The analysis also examines group interactions in the focus groups to help
overcome the homogeneity of groups. Doing this helps tease out differ-
ences of opinions among participants (Webb and Kevern 2001). This is part
of what makes focus groups valuable for theory building as these data may
push researchers to rethink existing categories. The focus group data in this
study challenge existing theoretical categories of harassment based on lim-
ited samples (e.g., white women) and help push forward the application of
sexual harassment law for diverse groups of women.
The data and analysis presented here are a product of our research pro-
cess as well as our commitment to understanding the experiences of the
women interviewed.2 We bring to our analysis not just an analytical frame-
work derived from the research on this topic but also an understanding that

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 95

comes from our political and personal debates over how sexual harassment
intersects with race, citizenship, and other aspects of women’s lives.

HOW DO WOMEN DEFINE SEXUAL AND

WORKPLACE HARASSMENT?

By letting women define harassment, we can discover where other forms

of oppression, such as racism, homophobia, lack of citizenship, disability,
and classism, intersect with sexual harassment. This helps us move beyond
a monolithic understanding of sexual and workplace harassment to one that
is more inclusive of the experiences of all women. Our analysis also calls
into question the legal definition of sexual harassment that may serve the
law well, but not necessarily diverse groups of women.

Legalistic View of Sexual Harassment:

White Women with Full Citizenship Rights

Four of the focus groups (two groups of union women, the sexual harass-
ment support group, and the federal employees group) consisted of women
whose definitions of sexual harassment fit most closely with legal under-
standings of sexual harassment. In two focus groups, when asked specifi-
cally about sexual harassment, these predominately white women citizens
stated that sexual harassment consists of “inferiorizing sexual contact,
degrading and inferior”; “the abuse of power”; “a course of conduct that is
unwelcome,” with unwelcome being the key word; and “a look, something
verbal, attitude, leering, etc. making you uncomfortable.” In the other two
focus groups, women did not explicitly define sexual harassment but rather
they told their stories of harassment. These women discuss being molested,
implicitly threatened with sexual assault, and other forms of unwanted sex-
ual conduct while at work.3
Most of the white women gave a fairly consistent view of sexual harass-
ment: Sexual harassment is behavior that is unwelcome and of a sexual
nature. In contrast, Giuffre and Williams (1994) find some workers draw
“boundary lines” around what they consider sexually harassing behaviors
and what are pleasurable and/or tolerable (see also Williams, Giuffre, and
Dellinger 2004). We believe the consistency of the understanding of the
white women in our study is related to two factors. First, the white women in
our study have the advantage of both white privilege and citizenship status.
Due to the invisibility of their whiteness and their citizenship status to

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96 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

themselves and to those harassing them, the white women are not harassed
based on their race or citizenship status. This privilege also makes it easier
for these women to see their experiences as fitting within the law. The white
women may perceive more opportunities to file complaints given their priv-
ilege in the legal system over other racialized and noncitizen groups.
Second, unlike Giuffre and Williams (1994), we include women who
have reported their harassment in our analysis. One interpretation of our
findings is that the process of filing a complaint may impose a legalistic
understanding of sexual harassment onto women’s experiences. Marshall
(1998) discusses how the complaint process leads to the development of a
“legal consciousness” about sexual harassment. Many of the white women,
who are the ones most likely to have reported their harassment in our study,
appear to have developed an understanding that sexual harassment is a legal
problem with a corresponding legal discourse for describing it. And in turn,
this process of filing a complaint leads to a legal consciousness that imposes
a legalistic view about how sexual harassment is defined (Welsh et al.
2005). We also believe our findings point to the way in which both race and
citizenship, which are normally considered absent in the analysis of white
women, play out in these women’s experiences. The status of being white
Canadian citizens combined with either their belief that they could report or
their actual reporting of their harassment, made it possible for the white
women to define their experiences as sexual harassment.

Women of Color and the Definition of Sexual Harassment

Most of the women of color in our focus groups consistently mention that
it was not simply sexual harassment that they experienced or that they were
not sure if they could define their experiences as harassment (Yoder and
Aniakudo 1996). For example, one woman of color in the sexual harass-
ment support group, when asked whether she experienced sexual harass-
ment differently than the white women in her group, stated the following:
“Racial comments were included. Comments about men of color, or my
skin color.” A Filipino live-in caregiver stated that she defined harassment
in the following way: “It’s like a mix. It’s a mix action. You don’t know if it
is if that person is doing it to you because of the color of your skin and the
type of the job that you have, you’re doing the dirty job in the house so you
don’t know if it is harassment or sexual harassment.” As we will discuss
next, defining harassment as a “mix action” differs across the women of
color and women lacking full citizenship rights in our study.

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 97

Black women with full citizenship rights. The focus group of Black
women demonstrates the racialized nature of workplace harassment. Simi-
lar to other research (Buchanan and Ormerod 2002), the Black women in
the focus group discuss how sexual harassment is intertwined with racial
issues. At the outset, this group defined the term sexual harassment as less
meaningful for describing their experiences compared to white women. As
part of their discussion, these women also made connections to how they do
not label sexual behaviors at work as sexual harassment. As one Black
woman stated, “we do not define it [sexual harassment] and I think we are
offended but we have grown to accept that as a norm, within our society.
’Cause the guys think it’s normal and so do we. You see the young girls. The
young girls, sometimes I get offended for them when these guys with their
old ugly self trying to say and do things, and they just ‘hee hee hee.’ ” The
Black women in this focus group discuss how sexual harassment has been
normalized between Black women and men.
At the same time, for many of these Black women, it is difficult to sepa-
rate sexual harassment in the workplace from sexual and racial harassment
in society at large. This has the effect of further complicating the issue
of labeling behaviors as sexual harassment. The following interchange
between the facilitator and focus group members illustrates this:

Facilitator: You know it’s interesting. I’m hearing something very inter-
esting happening around the table. We came here to talk about sexual
harassment, and as I’m listening to the things that people are saying,
I’m really hearing a lot of very subtle, not so subtle racial harassment
that goes on.
Participant A: That’s exactly what it is. Yes.
Participant B: . . . The racial piece is convoluted. Quite often it is
insidious.
Participant C: I think we, we as Black women would experience that,
because as you see at the very beginning, I think we can handle sexual
harassment. So it’s not a big deal for us. Really.
Participant A: That’s why we don’t name it.
Participant C: Yes, that’s right, we don’t think of it as sexual harassment.
Participant D: That’s right, we don’t think of it as sexual harassment
because we can handle it.
Participant E: You know, I have a little bit of a problem with that though.
But it would probably get a little bit more complex. I do think that,
going back to the not naming piece, I do think that Black women are
harassed a lot, but that they maybe don’t, as you said before, maybe

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98 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

don’t see it as sexual harassment. Um . . . perhaps a key, perhaps a very

key piece of evidence for that whether it be the workplace, or in the
social environment because we keep talking about the workplace . . .
but a key piece for the social environment is perhaps even more so than
the workplace. . . . They [Black women] have to go it alone.

Participant E proceeds to discuss how domestic relationships between

Black women and Black men affect Black women’s understanding of sex-
ual harassment. In particular, this Black woman focuses on issues of power
and abandonment between Black mothers and fathers. For this group of
women, their understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace cannot
be separated from the historical position of Black women, domestic rela-
tionships between Black men and women, and larger societal issues of
racism.
For several of the Black women in this focus group, the issue around sex-
ual harassment concerned their view that Black people may interpret sexual
harassment differently than do white people. This view emerged when the
Black women discussed harassment perpetrated by non-Black men. As one
Black woman stated when asked how sexual harassment affects Black
women, “maybe we don’t think about it. We just tell them what we think and
pass on. We let it go.” There is also the sense that the women in this focus
group believe they can handle harassment on their own when the race of the
harasser is different from their own race. As one Black women stated about
a non-Black male coworker who sometimes tries to touch her, “I’ve never
given much thought to it before. Apart from the fact that I don’t like being
touched like that. So, so, I just feel like he is um . . . coming into my personal
space. That’s how I feel. I’m not thinking of it as sexual harassment. Now I
am thinking of it that way, but all I’m seeing is, ‘He’s coming too close to me
and I’m going to have to slap him to make him understand this.’ ”
In this focus group, sexual harassment was often discussed as “easier to
handle” and less pressing than racial harassment and discrimination. Sexual
harassment was seen as something white women were less adept at han-
dling on their own compared to Black women. One clue to this may be the
race of the harasser: This emerged as an important factor in Black women’s
distinction between sexual harassment that they can handle versus sexual
harassment that they do not name.4 Texeira’s (2002) study of African Amer-
ican women law enforcement officers also points to the importance of the
race of the harasser (see also Giuffre and Williams 1994). The African
American women in Texeira’s study are reluctant to report if the harasser is
also African American due to the perceived need to keep a “united racial
front” (Texeira 2002, 540). The Black Canadian women in our study have a

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 99

slightly different take on not reporting harassment of Black men. While not
explicitly discussing a reluctance to report Black male harassers, this group
of women tends to view harassment from Black men as something that is
normalized and hence not defined as harassment.
A second explanation for the Black women’s definition of harassment
can be linked to the structure of sexual harassment law in Canada. In a legal
system with static categories of racial and sexual discrimination and harass-
ment, women who experience both are forced to prioritize which experi-
ence they put forward (Crenshaw 1989). This dynamic, intertwined with
systemic racism experienced by these Black women, could explain their
belief that sexual harassment is easier to handle in some cases.
The Black women in our study also have full citizenship rights that may
increase their awareness of being able to report their experiences. They may
choose not to, however. As one Black woman stated, “because we’re not
into, I think as people, we’re not into dragging one thing on and on and on,
and sexual harassment is something that’s always, it’s carried on for
years . . . in the courts. We want to take care of it now, finish it off.” Finally,
although not included in the analysis, the issue of class may intersect with
Black women’s understanding of harassment. While occupation is only a
rough approximation of class position, it is important to note that most of
the Black women are in professional jobs. Comparing the Black women to
some of the white union women from working-class backgrounds, we do
see a difference in the sexual and violent nature of harassment experienced.
The union women were more likely to experience degrading and violent
sexual behaviors, whereas the professional Black women experienced more
ambiguous types of behavior, such as jokes and touching. This may also
factor into Black women’s understanding of harassment as something they
can handle, especially when the harasser is of a different race.

Lack of full citizenship status, race, and harassment. For the women in
our study who immigrated to Canada, the issue of citizenship status was a
clear component of both their harassment experience and how they defined
this experience. One recent immigrant and woman of color in the federal
employee focus group did not define her experiences as sexual harassment,
even though she was previously told how sexual harassment is defined in
Canada and had watched a video about harassment directed at recent immi-
grants. Rather, she states, “At the time that I was being harassed on the job, I
was thinking, ‘harassment is a serious problem,’ so I never wanted to com-
plain. . . . I just complained my job was being disturbed, that I was being pre-
vented from doing my job. I just used different words instead of harass-
ment.” One interpretation of this woman’s experience is that she minimized

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100 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

her experience because she was uncomfortable with defining her experi-
ences according to the Canadian legal definition of sexual harassment.
The Filipinas working as domestic workers in our study provide insight
into how race and citizenship construct sexual harassment. Similar to
Browne and Misra’s discussion of domestic workers, we find this work to
be “especially ripe for discriminatory practices by gender and race” (2003,
502). The Filipino domestic workers face unique circumstances surround-
ing the intersection of their race and citizenship status. Many domestic
workers come to Canada as part of the Live-in Caregiver Program. These
immigrants receive an employment authorization visa that is usually valid
for one year and is renewable for two years. To renew their employment
authorization, immigrants must have a letter from their employer stating
that the position is renewed for another year. Although immigrants can
move to another employer while working under an employment authoriza-
tion, the immigrant must then apply for and receive a new employment
authorization before changing employers. While working under an employ-
ment authorization, immigrants are tied to a specific employer. This makes
it difficult to avoid harassment by changing jobs. Unlike women with full
citizenship rights, women in the Live-in Caregiver Program do not feel free
to leave their job and to seek a new employer. As Arat-Koc points out, for
foreign domestic workers, the Canadian government “has underregulated
working conditions while overregulating the workers” (2001, 367). After
two years, immigrants under the Live-in Caregiver Program may apply for
landed immigrant status (or the equivalent of a U.S. green card), whereby
their ability to stay in Canada is no longer linked to a specific employer.
How do Filipinas working as live-in caregivers define their harassment
experiences? In one of the Filipina focus groups, the women try to decide
whether one member of their focus group experienced sexual harassment
by a white elderly employer or whether it was just “old age.” One partici-
pant explains that her white employer is 92 years old, is a doctor, and still is
“smart” and mentally capable. She continues,

Many times he walks around the house with nothing on the bottom,
only the top. I said I don’t want you to walk around with nothing on.
He said, what’s the matter? So I said to myself, maybe just because he
was a doctor so he doesn’t care you know the part of the body is just
like part of your face, part of your hands. Because I work in a hospital
too, so I said to myself maybe that’s what he thinks. It’s up to me if I
think something if I define it differently. So I was confused and then
last night he was in the other room and I said, “Do you have something
on?” Because he was just wearing his top and he said, “Nothing, but

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 101

you cannot see nothing.” I said, “No, I don’t like it,” so I gave him
something to wear, but he didn’t give me any malice. He’s just natural.

Her concern is first dismissed by another participant, who comments, “He’s

old, it totally changes the behavior,” and says that his behavior cannot possi-
bly be harassment. Another participant comments that this could be a case
of dementia. Yet the woman experiencing the behavior continues to defend
herself by stating, “I know [it could be something else] but in this particular
thing he knows that it is bad . . . because he’s [not] doing that in front of the
children. . . . Every time he has a visitor, he dresses good, he fixes himself,
every time.” The women debate whether this is harassment if the older man
does not touch the woman and if it takes place in his home. The woman
experiencing this behavior expresses her frustration when she states, “No
one would believe me if I said my 90-year-old [employer] has nothing
wrong with his mind.”
At this point, the definition of what happened to the one caregiver is unre-
solved. Is it sexual harassment or something “natural” that the older
employer should be allowed to do? For women working in homes, the ambi-
guity around what is natural and what is harassment is a line that must be
negotiated. As the conversation proceeds, more information is given con-
cerning the context of what happened. The caregiver also grapples with the
difference between what is sexual harassment in Canada and what it is in the
Philippines.

Participant 2: I remember my first year, he is always telling me, “[Name]

why don’t you come with me in bed and make me warm?”
Participant 3: [gasps].
Participant 2: “Anyway, you are not getting pregnant” [he says]. “Just
keep me warm” [is what he says]. So I just, I don’t know the way to
take it in Canada because in the Philippines if somebody say that to
you and they don’t touch you, nothing happens, it’s just a word, but
here in Canada, it’s something.
Facilitator 2: Did he stop asking you that?
Participant 2: I think in three years, he mentioned it twice. A few times
and I just ignore and I said, “I don’t like the way you talk. You don’t
respect me. Why do you talk that way to me?”

While the white women with citizenship were able to fit much of their
experience into an understanding of what sexual harassment is in Canada,
the focus group of Filipinas struggled with defining harassment in Canada.
There are a myriad of forces that collide in their struggle to label this

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102 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

experience, including being Filipina, working for white employers, having

less than full citizenship rights, and working in their employers’ homes.
Their understanding of the definition of harassment in Canada conflicted
with their understandings of harassment in their home country, where little
if anything was socially or legally defined as sexual harassment. This con-
flict created ambiguities in their ability to define this particular experience
as harassment.
The focus groups of Filipinas echo the experiences of some of the Latina
domestic workers in Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (1997) study. Women repeatedly
mention feelings of isolation. Implicit in many of the comments is the belief
that due to their racialized status and lack of citizenship, they cannot leave
their jobs and fear losing the right to be in Canada if they complain. Com-
munity organizations have done much to inform live-in caregivers of their
rights, but many women still believe it will harm their chances of gaining
permanent resident status if they complain. Citizenship matters in how
these women define and deal with their harassment. As one Filipina domes-
tic worker stated, “and even if you don’t like your situation you just wait for
the time [when you have more permanent citizenship status] to leave.”
Stasiulis and Bakan (1997, 123) comment about the current situation of
female foreign domestic workers in Canada: “In reality, this policy [the
Live-in Caregiver Program] serves to counterpose the citizenship rights of
the employing families—usually white, relatively wealthy professional
couples with two or more pre-school-age children—to the restriction of cit-
izenship rights of Third World women.” As with domestic workers in gen-
eral, the harassment experiences of the Filipinas working as domestic work-
ers in our study makes visible the processes of race, citizenship, and gender
(Arat-Koc 2001; Browne and Misra 2003) and demonstrates how citizen-
ship is “still deployed to create and maintain race and gender hierarchies”
(Nakano Glenn 2000b, 27).

CONCLUSION

In her analysis of intersectional theorizing, Stasiulis asks, “Which social

relations in the seemingly dizzying array of differences should be accorded
particular salience or significance in any given theoretical framework is
impossible to predict a priori” (1999, 378). Our choice to focus on race
and citizenship should not be seen as meaning that other identities and
oppressions are irrelevant. Rather, in the analysis of our data, issues of race
and citizenship emerged as dominant themes that shaped diverse women’s
definitions of harassment. It is not simply that white women, women of

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 103

color, and women with and without legal citizenship rights have different
understandings of what constitutes sexual harassment. It is more that the
term sexual harassment and its meaning are interlocked with race and
citizenship status.
The experiences of the white women with full citizenship rights in our
study appear to be the most easily encapsulated by both legal and social sci-
ence definitions of sexual harassment. Although white women’s percep-
tions of sexual harassment match most closely with legal understandings of
sexual harassment, it may be that it is our legal understandings that mirror
white women’s understandings of sexual harassment. The law is a powerful
structuring mechanism for what is defined as sexual harassment.
Women of color present diverse definitions of harassment. The Black
women in our study define harassment in two ways. When perpetrated by
Black men, these women tend not to label their experiences as harassment.
They link it back to historical issues of sexism in the Black community.
When discussing sexual harassment from non-Black men, these women say
harassment is something they can handle on their own and is not as pressing
a problem as racism and racial harassment. Filipina domestic workers see
sexual harassment in their workplaces as more ambiguous. Working for
predominately white employers in their homes, it is not always clear where
the boundary lines between appropriate and inappropriate behavior lie. The
Filipina workers also make direct connections to their lack of full citizen-
ship rights in terms of how this affects their ability to do anything about their
experiences.
This analysis highlights how current conceptual and legal understand-
ings of sexual harassment are not always meaningful and may not capture
the experiences of many women, especially women of color. The women of
color in our study do not see their harassment as being about race or gender;
rather, it is about how race and gender, along with citizenship, intersect that
defines their experiences. In terms of legal definitions, Crenshaw (1989)
points out how Black women’s employment discrimination claims have dif-
ficulty being recognized because legal arguments must be framed as either
sexual or racial discrimination, not both.
Crenshaw (1989) argues that shifting our understanding of discrim-
ination to be inclusive of women of color calls into question our current
legal definitions of sexual harassment. In a precedent-setting document,
the Ontario Human Rights Commission (2002) discusses the need to
incorporate an understanding of intersectionality into discrimination and
harassment complaint mechanisms. This includes building into reporting
mechanisms the need to probe women (and men) for the ways that their
experiences are unique due to overlapping oppressions and for accounting

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104 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2006

for the intersection of these oppressions when determining remedies for the
harassment. For women of color and women lacking full citizenship rights
who have had their experiences rendered invisible by the dominant dis-
courses of race or gender, these are important first steps in having the legal
discourse and mechanisms around sexual harassment account for their
experiences.

NOTES

1. We also did interviews with 17 women to explore these issues as well as issues
related to reporting harassment. While not included in this analysis, our work is
also informed by these interviews.
2. An earlier version of this article contained a discussion of the conflicts that
arose in the research process. Due to space limitations, this discussion was
dropped. We do not want to give the impression though that the research process
was smooth and seamless. At two points in time, this project was polarized over the
issues of racism and the entry point for the study. Some researchers conceived of
the project starting with an analysis of gendered violence against women while oth-
ers spoke of how racism was the appropriate starting place. We were caught in a
debate over what an intersectional analysis should look like. This debate can be
considered part of larger historical and political debates concerning “the prioritiza-
tion of race and racism despite the general insistence [in intersectional theorizing]
upon the simultaneity of social relations based upon race, gender, and class”
(Stasiulis 1999, 356). Details of the research conflicts and researchers’responses to
these conflicts can be found in Carr et al. (2004).
3. This example also highlights the issue of class position as some of these white
working-class women experienced violent and severe harassment similar to one of
the domestic workers from the Philippines but different from that of the middle-
class professional women in our study (including white and Black women). We do
not want to mute the diversity of class experiences within the groups in our study.
Yet in the interest of space, we made the difficult decision to focus on race and citi-
zenship for this analysis.
4. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the importance of
the race of the harasser, an aspect often overlooked in studies of sexual harassment.

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 Welsh et al. / HARASSMENT ACROSS RACE AND CITIZENSHIP 105

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Sandy Welsh is an associate professor of sociology at the University of

Toronto. Her research projects examine sexual harassment, intersectionality
and work, and the professionalization of complementary and alternative
medicine. With Myrna Dawson, she has recently published in the Sociologi-
cal Quarterly on how the law works for the settlement of sexual harassment
complaints.

Jacquie Carr is a proponent for workplace human rights. She began her work
in education and advocacy as a result of the workplace sexual harassment
and murder of her mother, Theresa Vince. She believes that the path to lasting
remedies for workplace violence begins with the voices of those who have
lived it.

Barbara MacQuarrie is the community director for the Centre for Research
on Violence Against Women and Children at the University of Western
Ontario. Working from an intersectional perspective, she promotes collabo-
ration between those who experience violence, service providers, and
academics.

Audrey Huntley is of mixed Anishnawbe, German immigrant, and Euro-

Canadian ancestry. She has participated in several community-based
research projects examining violence against women. She currently works
for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s News Sunday and has com-
pleted her first feature-length documentary, Go Home Baby Girl, about the
unsolved murder of Norma George.

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