Sexual harassment at work strongly reduces GDP
Prof. Baha Kalinowska-Sufinowicz from the University of Economics in Poznań, according to the formula developed by British researchers, estimated how much harassment at work costs the Polish economy.
British researchers first counted the annual cost of work-related stress to the economy and then determined how much of it is related to harassment. To this, they also added the costs of harassing employee turnover at work and lowering their productivity. The numbers obtained when added together gave an estimate of the value of the costs of harassment: nearly £13.75 million for 2007.
However, as emphasized by prof. Baha Kalinowska-Sufinowicz, calculations of the costs of harassment using this method ranged from £682 million to £17.65 billion on an annual basis.
Based on the formula of British scientists, Baha Kalinowska-Sufinowicz estimated the costs of sexual harassment at work related to absenteeism and loss of productivity at the enterprise level for Poland.
As she calculated, the annual cost of sexual harassment for the Polish economy ranges between PLN 14.2-31.7 billion, depending on the assumptions made. In this worse scenario, this is equivalent to 1.5 percent of GDP. The data that the researcher took into account was from 2018.
