Next time you order fast food, consider what women face behind the counter (MCD)

Emily Cohn

Forty percent of women working in the fast food industry have been sexually harassed at work.

That's according to a recent survey by Hart Research, which conducted an online survey of more than 1,200 working in non-managerial fast food jobs in the US. The most common forms of harassment included sexual teasing, jokes, remarks, or questions; hugging or touching; and questions about your sexual interests or unwanted information about others' sexual interests.

This startling statistic, first reported by the Huffington Post's Emily Peck, was cited in a blog post written by Cycei Monae who worked as a cashier at a McDonald's in Flint, Michigan. Monae was one of 15 people who recently filed federal complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that they were harassed while working at McDonald's.

"Nearly every day, my shift manager would rub himself against me or try to grab my backside when he passed me," Monae writes on the Huffington Post. "He would compliment my body and say he wanted to 'do things' to me."

Monae says after her manager "came up from behind and put a cellphone photo of his genitals in front of me," she reported the harassment to McDonald's corporate, but nothing happened.

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When the complaints were first announced last week, McDonald's spokesman Terri Hickey told Business Insider the company was reviewing the harassment allegations. McDonald's could not immediately be reached following the publication of Monae's blog post.

The Hart Research survey found that nearly half of the sexual harassment victims they surveyed reported health problems like stress, anxiety, and depression as a result. Only 40% of those who had been harassed reported the incident to their employer.

Sexual harassment has become a hot button political issue as of late, following last week's discovery of a 2005 recording of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump boasting about being able to "grab" women "by the p---y."

Since the publication of the tape, Trump has repeatedly said the comments were "locker room banter."

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