HANOVER — With the fight to raise the minimum wage gaining national attention, advocates for ending the so-called “subminimum” wage for tipped workers say it keeps incomes low and sexual harassment high in the restaurant industry.

Research by nonprofit advocacy group One Fair Wage showed that restaurants in states that allow a separate, lower minimum wage for workers who receive tips have twice as much reported sexual harassment as those with an across-the-board minimum wage.

“This is the industry with the highest rates of sexual harassment,” Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage and director of food labor research at the University of California Berkeley, said at a Dartmouth College forum Thursday night. “Women struggling to survive have to tolerate inappropriate customer behavior to feed their families in tips.”

The virtual forum hosted by the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy also featured Catharine MacKinnon, a University of Michigan Law School professor who pioneered the concept of sexual harassment as a form of illegal discrimination.

At 75%, New Hampshire’ proportion of women in its tipped workforce is the highest of any state, according to Jayaraman.

She said this power dynamic between female servers and male customers was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Now they have to enforce social distancing and mask rules on the same customers from whom they already rely on tips to survive,” she said.

Some female servers have faced demands to remove their mask to receive a tip — evoking the demeaning objectification of more overt sexual harassment.

“It’s the ‘take it off’ effect,” MacKinnon said.

“To keep this from happening, there is one very preventable step: paying a minimum wage with tips on top.” MacKinnon said.

New Hampshire ties its minimum wage to the federal minimum of $7.25, which was last raised in 2009. Vermont’s minimum wage increased by 79 cents to $11.75 per hour. Earlier this year, the U.S. Senate blocked a bid by President Joe Biden to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour as part of his American Rescue Plan stimulus package.

While Biden was stymied on the national minimum wage, last week he issued an executive order for federal contract workers, raising their minimum wage from $10.95 an hour to $15. That order also raised contractors’ tipped minimum from the current $7.65 an hour to the standard minimum by 2024.

Tipped-minimum employees outside of government contract work face bleaker prospects. The subminimum in New Hampshire is 45% of the minimum wage, or $3.27 currently. In Vermont, it’s $5.88. The federal subminimum for tipped workers is currently $2.13 an hour.

And like the standard minimum wage, special interests are pushing against any change to the tipped minimum.

The New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association is backing a bill in Concord that would prevent tipped employees from getting an increase in the subminimum wage if there is an increase in the federal minimum wage. A lobbyist for the industry told the Union Leader earlier this week that servers in the state already average $20 an hour, with their tips.

But One Fair Wage ran a poll in New Hampshire that found 80% of workers wanted a fair minimum wage with tips on top, Jayaraman said.

Frances Mize can be reached for comment at fmize@vnews.com.