Navigating the unspoken: A qualitative study of employees’ perceptions of culture and norms surrounding sexual harassment at a Swedish university

Abstract

Sexual harassment persists in academic workplaces despite extensive policy frameworks. This study explored how employees at a large Swedish university perceive and articulate the organisational culture and everyday norms that shape sexual harassment. Ten focus group discussions were held with forty staff members, separated by managerial role and conducted in Swedish or English. Transcripts were analysed using qualitative content analysis to identify shared meanings, latent themes and interpretive patterns. Analysis generated one overarching theme, perceiving sexual harassment through the lens of organisational silence, power relations, and negotiated boundaries, supported by four sub-themes. Participants described boundary-setting as a collective, situational process: definitions of harassment shifted in real time, with women often seeking peer confirmation while men framed the same conduct as innocuous. Formal and informal hierarchies amplified this ambiguity: senior researchers with grant-generating prestige were deemed ‘untouchable’, and managers reported uncertainty about how to act without clear procedural guidance. Silence emerged as a strategic response to protect careers and collegial relationships, normalising borderline behaviours through humour and rationalisation. Yet employees also engaged in discrete forms of peer solidarity, staying with vulnerable colleagues after meetings, quietly redirecting collaborations, which signalled a sense of collective responsibility even in the absence of robust institutional support. These findings show that policy compliance alone cannot shift workplace culture when interpretive authority rests with peer groups and incentive structures reward silence. Universities therefore need to focus on organisational level responses that equip leaders with emotional competence and procedural clarity and support the creation of a work environment that can identify, prevent, and respond to sexual harassment. Embedding such measures can transform informal solidarity into a shared, institutionally endorsed standard of respect.