Violence against women at work

Working paper

Between-colleague conflicts are common. We link every police report in Finland to administrative data to identify assaults between colleagues, and economic outcomes for victims, perpetrators, and firms. We document large, persistent labor market impacts of between colleague violence on victims and perpetrators. Male perpetrators experience substantially weaker consequences after attacking women compared to men. Perpetrators’ economic power in male-female violence partly explains this asymmetry. Male-female violence causes a decline in women at the firm. There is no change in within-network hiring, ruling out supplyside explanations via "whisper networks". Only male-managed firms lose women. Female managers do one important thing differently: fire perpetrators.

Authors: Adams-Prassl, A; Huttunen, K; Nix, E; Zhang, N

• Publication status: Published
• Publisher: University of Oxford
• Series: Department of Economics Discussion Paper Series
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2022-07-13
• ISSN: 1471-0498
• Paper number: 979
• Language: English