According to the Sexually Explicit Material in the Workplace Survey, it’s not just men who are viewing sex online in the office. Fifty-three percent of the women surveyed said it is likely that they would look at porn if it was on a colleague’s computer screen.
More than half of the workers studied said they were sexually stimulated when they saw adult content on computers while they were on the job. And while 53 percent of employees said they were turned on by seeing porn on a colleague’s computer, only 40 percent said that viewing adult content on their own office screens sexually aroused them.
The survey also determined that males are three times more likely than females to download adult material on office computers.
A third of those surveyed download porn or send emails with bawdy graphics via their office desktops to co-workers or friends outside of work, and it’s more likely for Australian and U.K. employees to transmit porn via company email than for their American counterparts to do so.
Three percent of Aussies are likely to forward porn internally to officemates, which could pose workplace problems.
Recently, the British government fired 19 civil servants and disciplined more than 200 staffers for viewing adult content online at the Department of Work and Pensions in London. The staff reportedly accessed 2 million pages of web porn in the last year.
The Sexually Explicit Material in the Workplace Survey was commissioned by SurfControl, an Internet email filtering firm. SurfControl has offices located in California, Massachusetts, Singapore, Australia and five European countries, including the United Kingdom.
The survey was conducted by Dr. Monica Whitty of the School of Psychology at Queens University Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Dr. Whitty studied 350 workers in the U.S., U.K. and Australia from May 17 to Aug. 23.