Survey Shows 27 Percent of Flight Attendants Sexually Harassed

There’s no question the flight attendant has always played an integral part of an airline’s image, especially during the early days of consumer air travel as some carriers brazenly trumpeted the sexy stewardess as part of its marketing campaigns.

It comes as no surprise then that a new survey found that more than a quarter of flight attendants who responded said they were sexually harassed while on duty in-flight during the last 12 months.

The survey was conducted by the Hong Kong-based Equal Opportunities Commission, in partnership with the Hong Kong Flight Attendants Alliance (HKFAA), from late November 2013 to early January 2014. The survey was based on 392 returned questionnaires which were distributed to 9,000 flight attendants through HKFAA.

The Survey revealed that 27 percent (106) of the respondents had been sexually harassed when they were on duty in-flight in the last twelve months, while about 47 percent (185) indicated that they had either witnessed or heard about their colleagues being sexually harassed in-flight. Broken down by gender, 86 percent (337) of the respondents were female and 14 percent (53) were male. Among the female respondents, 29 percent (97) of them expressed that they had been sexually harassed in their work settings in the past year, compared to 17 percent (9) of the male respondents who had encountered sexual harassment.

By comparison, a November 2013 survey conducted by The Huffington Post in conjunction with YouGov reported that 13 percent of respondents reported having been sexually harassed by a boss or another superior, and 19 percent by a co-worker who wasn’t a boss or other superior.

Sexual harassment experienced by the flight attendants was mostly manifested in the form of physical contact (100 counts out of a total of 239 counts of sexual harassment allegations) such as “patting, touching, kissing or pinching”; non-verbal sex cues (76 counts) such as “staring in a sexual way”; oral/textual/electronic messages (44 counts) such as “sexual jokes and requests for sexual favours”; and hostile environment (19 counts) such as “showing obscene or pornographic materials.”

Further, the survey provided an insight into the profile of the harassers in cases of sexual harassment experienced by flight attendants. It was found that sexual harassment of flight attendants by customers (59 percent) was significantly more prevalent than sexual harassment by their fellow staff (41 percent) such as senior cabin crew and cockpit crew members.