S9 Ep49: Combatting sexual harassment in the military

Norwegian conscripts arrive at boot camp straight out of school. They are assigned at random to a shared room and they live in it for the next eight weeks. Whatever the culture of that room turns out to be, they are stuck with it.

We know that the military everywhere has a poor record on sexual harassment. Johanna Rickne (Stockholm University, CEPR) and her co-authors wanted to reduce its acceptance, and the number of incidents.

Compulsory training, standing a in a room a showing a PowerPoint, has a poor record. It can even inspire a backlash. Instead,  they included two pieces of information in a 20-minute enrolment survey. One fact was about how women score on the army's own end-of-service assessments. The other was about what last year's recruits really thought about crude sexual jokes. Eight weeks later, the researchers came back to see what had changed for the 949 recruits.

The research behind this episode:

Olle Folke, Torbjørn Hanson, Åshild A. Johnsen, Andreas Kotsadam, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Targeting Attitudes to Combat Sexual Harassment: A Randomized Intervention in the Norwegian Military." CEPR Discussion Paper 21475. The discussion paper is gated. It is also published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

To cite this episode:

Phillips, Tim, and Johanna Rickne. 2026. "Combatting sexual harassment in the military." VoxTalks Economics (podcast).

About the guest

Johanna Rickne is Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University, and holds part-time chairs at the University of Nottingham and the Stockholm School of Economics. She is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans labour economics, political economics and gender economics, with sustained work on sexual harassment as a workplace hazard, on who ends up in political office, and on what makes work meaningful. She won the Assar Lindbeck Medal in 2023.

Research cited in this episode

The Sexual Experiences Questionnaire is the behavioural instrument used to measure prevalence here. Rather than asking people whether they were sexually harassed, a term that different people read very differently, it presents a list of specific behaviours and asks whether each one happened. The version used in Norway runs to 14 items and is adapted from the questionnaire developed for the US military.

Gender harassment is one of three categories in the standard model of sexual harassment, alongside unwanted sexual attention and sexual coercion. It covers hostile or demeaning conduct based on someone's sex or gender that is not necessarily sexual in nature, including remarks that a person is not suited to the job. In this boot camp it was the most common behaviour reported by women.