Contextualising Workplace Sexual Harassment in the Global South: A Narrative Review Focusing on India

Academic research into workplace sexual harassment (WSH) has disproportionately focused on Western or Global North societies, whilst paying much less attention to the occurrence of WSH—as well as the experiences of women survivors—in “majority world” or Global South societies. Here, we seek to redress this balance by reviewing and evaluating the extant research on WSH in one of the largest Global South societies: India. We provide a narrative review of the extant literature exploring the themes, narratives and discourses on WSH contributed by the Indian academia. We found 88 published articles across four databases that met our inclusion criteria, which provide a range of insights regarding: (i) Occurrence (including, prevalence and forms of WSH, perpetrator and survivor characteristics, and sexism and work environments facilitating WSH), and (ii) Consequences of WSH and barriers to redressal (including, mental and physical health impacts on survivors, underreporting of WSH, workplace policies and procedures, and legal and societal barriers). We also identified three notable gaps in the literature, namely, the sociocultural barriers survivors face beyond the workplace while seeking redressal, health and work-related consequences for survivors, and the role of intersectional disadvantaged identities of survivors (e.g. caste, region, religion) in threat and silencing. Finally, we argue that adopting a sociocultural perspective, especially while studying barriers to redressal, could also aid research in the Global North.