The Gender Difference in Preferences for a Working Environment Characterized by Mutual Respect among Members of Political Youth Organizations.

How do sexism and harassment influence the pipeline to politics? Research indicates that sexism and victimization may have long-term detrimental consequences and that victims of harassment are much more likely to quit their jobs than non-victims. Doing politics is not an ordinary job, and indeed not always a job. But if similar patterns exist in youth organizations, sexism and harassment are likely to gentrify the pipeline to politics. Hence, it is particularly important to investigate how this unfolds in youth organizations. Therefore, we use a conjoint experiment to investigate how preferences for political influence and working environments characterized by mutual respect vary between men and women, and victims and non-victims in youth organizations. Conjoint experiments have revealed that women state stronger preferences for working environments characterized by mutual respect, while they hold similar preferences for formal work conditions like influence, remuneration, and workload. In line with this we expect that women and victims of sexual harassment hold stronger preferences about the quality of the working environment than men and non-victims. But we add to this as we investigate if women and men perceive and experience sexism and victimization differently, and how this is associated with differences in preferences for working environments characterized by mutual respect. The survey is to be distributed in early Spring 2024. The conjoint experiment is a paired choice design where respondents choose between two hypothetical political positions that are randomly varied across four attributes which are level of political influence, quality of the working environment, pay, and workload. After the experiment, we pose a battery of five questions asking candidates if they have experienced five specific types of harassment in politics. Lastly, we ask them to assess their risk of being victims of sexual harassment in relation to their political activities now and in the future.