Migrant and refugee women in Australia do not feel safe at work

Nearly half of migrant and refugee women in Australia have reported at least one form of sexual harassment in the workplace in the past five years.

That’s what respondents said in our first comprehensive survey of its kind, in which we asked migrant and refugee women from across Australia about their experiences of sexual harassment in the workplace.

And the responses were clear.

However, sexual harassment is just one of the reasons why they do not feel safe at work.

Our new research draws on the stories of 900 migrant and refugee women from across Australia who participated in our survey, focus groups and interviews.

We hope that the critical insights will contribute to an agenda aimed at ensuring the safety of all women in the workplace and beyond.

We focus here on three key findings.

1. Sexual harassment and racial discrimination are not separate experiences

In 2023, we published the findings from Phase 1 of this research.

Forty-six percent of migrant and refugee women who participated in our national survey reported experiencing at least one form of sexual harassment in the workplace in Australia in the past five years.

The study found that discrimination based on race and religion is a major motivator for sexual harassment in the workplace.

Phase 2 of this research included interviews and focus groups and allowed for a more in-depth examination of the links between discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.

A common issue that emerged was that – regardless of sector, education or employment status – overt and implicit racism was part of women’s work experiences.

Like this one from a woman who identified herself as a second-generation migrant:

You’re taught to… forgive my language… police shit. And specifically because you’re going to have white employers, white managers, you know, racism is going to happen… sexual harassment… you just know it’s going to be a shitty time for you. But you just swallow it and you move on because you need the paycheck.

The women’s experiences with racial discrimination and sexual harassment varied, but the question many women asked rhetorically was, “If I were white, would this happen to me?”

The sector stakeholders we interviewed also recognised this overlap, saying that “sexual harassment in the workplace is an expression of violence and power… so all of those intersecting vulnerability factors are going to be at play”.

Focus group participants pointed out that gendered and stereotypical ideas often underlie behaviors targeting different groups of women.

One woman reported feeling like she was “often the target of aggression because… people… have a stereotype, like Asian women don’t speak out… I feel like (because of)… who we are, we’re more likely to be sexually harassed.”

Many women reported having to learn how to ‘adopt’ the Australian culture of joking. This directly affected women’s responses to the harassment they experienced and their willingness to report the behaviour, as one person told us:

I have even been told “Indians…don’t have…thick skin like us.” So I have lost all motivation to complain.

2. Women continue to face sexual harassment without any support because they fear losing their jobs

Paid work and a stable source of income are essential for the residency and security of migrant women in Australia.

A major reason why some women did not formally disclose their experiences was because they were concerned about the impact on their work.

Female migrants and refugees were more likely to share their experiences informally with other women (friends or colleagues), but did not file formal complaints.

Temporary visa holders have the added burden of navigating the migration system if they have to leave their jobs. Some women cited this as a major reason for remaining silent and tolerating intimidating and abusive behaviour in the workplace.

For other migrant and refugee women, like many women in Australia, the solution to their feelings of insecurity at work was to leave rather than speak up.

It’s pretty scary. While it’s the right thing to do, it can jeopardize your role. That’s why it’s better to just find a new role and move.

These choices reflect how persistent workplace or employer inaction, combined with a culture of victim blaming, impacts the way women secure their livelihoods and safety.

3. Silence around sexual harassment creates impunity

Migrant and refugee women overwhelmingly told us that the silence surrounding harassment is also a major barrier to reporting it.

If they did indeed complain, the most likely outcome was that the perpetrator or complainant was moved within the organization.

No formal measures were taken, there were no ‘real’ consequences and there was only limited formal recognition that the perpetrator’s behaviour was unacceptable in the workplace.

An overarching concern was that workplace responses were not transparent, reminiscent of the recent University of Sydney report and the state government’s commitments to the use of confidentiality agreements.

A lack of transparency leads to a lack of public or formal recognition of the harms women experience in the workplace.

It places the burden of harassment on the women themselves, who are treated with suspicion and/or seen as a problem in the workplace.

As one woman told us:

Many companies have policies that allow you to report certain things. But how do I make sure that if I report, nothing happens to me that has a negative impact on my position?

Prioritizing women’s safety at work

This is the first comprehensive study of its kind.

It was designed in part to fill a significant gap in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) national investigations into workplace sexual harassment, which failed to adequately capture the breadth and diversity of migrant and refugee experiences.

Although this research provides many recommendations, the first is the most important:

Women’s safety at work must be paramount and it must be recognised that isolated responses to discrimination, exploitation and harassment can undermine the recognition that women experience all of these behaviours simultaneously and that all of these behaviours undermine women’s safety at work.

Policy continues to differentiate between forms of workplace harm, when we know that the problem lies primarily at the intersections, such as when racism encourages sexual harassment.

This is a major challenge for existing systems.

Our research aims to provide a solid foundation for challenging assumptions about best practices, national approaches to research, and who is responsible for sexual harassment in the workplace.

It is critical that we focus on the diversity of women’s experiences to better understand what safe work can and should look like for everyone working in Australia.