Racial Harassment
A victim may experience racial harassment because of their race, skin color, ancestry, origin country, or citizenship.
Even perceived attributes of a certain ethnicity (e.g. hair texture, skin color, accent, food, use of certain slang or other words, customs, beliefs, holidays or celebrations, clothing) may be the cause. Racial harassment often looks like:
Use of slurs in general or directed at the victim
Insulting or degrading comments about the victim’s race or a race as a whole
Sharing of racial jokes, “memes,” or images
Acting disgusted to be around the victim (e.g. refusal to share a cubicle; acting grossed-out by the victim’s cultural foods brought for lunch)
Intolerance of differences
Gender Harassment
Gender-based harassment is discriminatory behavior towards a person based on their gender expression. It can happen to cisgendered women or men (people whose gender identity matches that they were assigned at birth), trans women or men, and non-binary or two-spirited employees.
Negative gender stereotypes about how men or women should act or look are often the center of harassment. Some examples include:
A male nurse faces harassment for having what’s perceived as a woman’s job
A female banker is passed over for a promotion because she’s not “leader material”
A male colleague displays materials (e.g. comics, posters, screen savers) that are degrading to women
A non-binary person is referred to as “it” by a coworker
A transgender man is referred to as “she” in an email