The Game Within the Game: How Women Navigate and Label Workplace Harassment in the #MeToo Era
Session Title
Special Populations
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation
Start Date
26-5-2026 12:00 AM
Abstract
Harassment remains a pervasive reality for many women in the workplace, yet few explicitly label their experiences as such. Instead, women often adopt alternative labels or avoid labeling altogether—a phenomenon feminist scholars call “non-labeling.” Drawing on 56 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women working in the U.S. gaming industry, this research uses a feminist, constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how women navigate labeling, or not labeling, their experiences with workplace harassment. Although many women’s experiences met legal and scholarly definitions of gender, racial, and/or sexual harassment, they often chose not to label them as such, instead reframing them with less stigmatizing labels such as “inappropriate behavior.” Moving beyond singular explanations, I argue that non-labeling is a multifaceted, fluid process shaped by intersecting macro-, meso-, and individual-level factors. The sociocultural context of the #MeToo movement and postfeminist ideology (macro), gaming's male-dominated and overtly-sexualized industry culture (meso), and women’s racial identities and positional power (individual) collectively shape women’s decisions not to label their experiences as harassment. Choosing non-labels is strategic: it allows women to acknowledge their experiences while maintaining agency and sidestepping the stigma and professional repercussions attached to the harassment label.
The Game Within the Game: How Women Navigate and Label Workplace Harassment in the #MeToo Era
Harassment remains a pervasive reality for many women in the workplace, yet few explicitly label their experiences as such. Instead, women often adopt alternative labels or avoid labeling altogether—a phenomenon feminist scholars call “non-labeling.” Drawing on 56 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with women working in the U.S. gaming industry, this research uses a feminist, constructivist grounded theory approach to examine how women navigate labeling, or not labeling, their experiences with workplace harassment. Although many women’s experiences met legal and scholarly definitions of gender, racial, and/or sexual harassment, they often chose not to label them as such, instead reframing them with less stigmatizing labels such as “inappropriate behavior.” Moving beyond singular explanations, I argue that non-labeling is a multifaceted, fluid process shaped by intersecting macro-, meso-, and individual-level factors. The sociocultural context of the #MeToo movement and postfeminist ideology (macro), gaming's male-dominated and overtly-sexualized industry culture (meso), and women’s racial identities and positional power (individual) collectively shape women’s decisions not to label their experiences as harassment. Choosing non-labels is strategic: it allows women to acknowledge their experiences while maintaining agency and sidestepping the stigma and professional repercussions attached to the harassment label.