“Her Voice Is So Pleasant!”: Sexual Harassment in Chinese Law Firms

ABSTRACT

Sexual harassment is frequently observed yet rarely reported in Chinese law firms. Drawing on 103 interviews with early‐career lawyers, this article examines why women lawyers, despite possessing legal expertise that should equip them to identify and resist sexual harassment, experience harassment patterns similar to those documented in other industries. It argues that sexual harassment in Chinese law firms is incubated within a toxic work environment characterized by paternalistic “benevolent” control and overt hostility. This environment normalizes boundary‐testing behaviors and facilitates escalation toward individual harassment. The article identifies four institutional features of the Chinese legal profession that jointly produce harassment: (1) institutional power structures, (2) relationship‐based services, (3) boundless temporal and spatial work arrangements, and (4) elite and exclusive professional culture. These features override the theoretical advantages of legal knowledge, making it difficult for the very professionals trained to exercise legal rights to resist harassment. The findings contribute to scholarship on workplace sexual harassment by demonstrating how profession‐specific institutional and cultural contexts account for the persistence of harassment in elite work settings.