Sexual Harassment in Academic World: Lack of Awareness and Deficiency in Data Collection

This article deals with the attitude of political and social actors towards the problem of sexual harassment in academic world. In the first part of the paper I report on the low awareness on the question displayed by Italian Public Institutions (Consigliera per la Parità presso il Ministero del Lavoro, Dipartimento delle Pari Opportunità presso la Presidenza del Consiglio and ISTAT, just to name a few): this issue is witnessed by the deficiency in data collection on the subject. In the second part, I focus on the actions undertaken by CUG (Comitato Unico di Garanzia, formerly Comitato Pari Opportunità) at Università Politecnica delle Marche: in “Piano di Azioni Positive” for the periods 2013-2015 and 2016-2018 the issues of sexual harassment are not even named; I also describe the structure and contents of two surveys undertaken at the university in the last ten years, concentrating my analysis on the selection operated in the design of the data collection towards the problem of sexual harassment and violence in our workplace.