The year is 2020 and men are still making sex jokes at work. Moreover, according to new research, more than a quarter of them think it is a-okay to be doing so.
A new global survey of over 20,000 people in 27 countries from King’s College London found what researchers called “significant differences” in what men and women consider appropriate workplace behavior, CNN reported.
One of those differences involves cracking sex jokes at the office. While 28 percent of men said it’s okay to tell sexual jokes and stories at work, only 16 percent of the women surveyed agreed.
The men and women surveyed also had different ideas when it comes to what counts as NSFW. The study found that 13 percent of men globally think it’s fine to display “material of a sexual nature” at work, compared with just 7 percent of women. In China, more than a third of men agreed that sexual material is acceptable in the workplace.
Meanwhile, despite the many men who claim to be scared to even interact with a female employee in the #MeToo era, 15 percent think it’s acceptable to pursue a colleague romantically, and that’s after that colleague had previously said no.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study also found that women feel less confident calling out this behavior than their male coworkers. While 48 percent of women said they would be confident approaching a senior colleague about sexist workplace conduct, 58 percent of men said they could handle it.
In conclusion, offices around the globe are still sexist nightmares and lots of people (mostly male ones) are still fine with it. We obviously can’t fix all of this right now, but maybe leaving the 69 jokes at home could be a good place to start.
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