Explaining Sexual Harassment Judgments Looking Beyond Gender of the Rater

• Published in: Law and human behavior Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 69 - 95
• Main Authors: O'Connor, Maureen, Gutek, Barbara A, Stockdale, Margaret, Geer, Tracey M, Melançon, Renée
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers 01.02.2004; American Psychological Law Society
• Series: Psychology, Law, and the Workplace
• Subjects: Adult; Adults; Age Factors; Behavior; College students; Credibility; Data Collection; Decision Making; Federal Government; Female; Gender; Gender differences; Harassment; Hostile work environments; Hostility; Human; Human Males; Human Sex Differences; Humans; Hypotheses; Judgment; Male; Men; Multivariate Analysis; Perceptions; Plaintiffs; Prejudice; Ratings & rankings; Sex Discrimination; Sex Factors; Sexism; Sexual Harassment; Sexual Harassment - legislation & jurisprudence; Sexual Harassment - psychology; Students; Studies; United States; Variables; Women; Work environment; Work environments; Working Conditions; Working Women; Workplaces; United States; United States > US; gender; hostile sexism; sexual harassment
• ISSN: 0147-7307; 1573-661X
• DOI: 10.1023/B:LAHU.0000015004.39462.6e

In two decades of research on sexual harassment, one finding that appears repeatedly is that gender of the rater influences judgments about sexual harassment such that women are more likely than men to label behavior as sexual harassment. Yet, sexual harassment judgments are complex, particularly in situations that culminate in legal proceedings. And, this one variable, gender, may have been overemphasized to the exclusion of other situational and rater characteristic variables. Moreover, why do gender differences appear? As work by Wiener and his colleagues have done ( R. L. Wiener et al., 2002 ; R. L. Wiener & L. Hurt, 2000 ; R. L. Wiener, L. Hurt, B. Russell, K. Mannen, & C. Gasper, 1997 ), this study attempts to look beyond gender to answer this question. In the studies reported here, raters (undergraduates and community adults), either read a written scenario or viewed a videotaped reenactment of a sexual harassment trial. The nature of the work environment was manipulated to see what, if any, effect the context would have on gender effects. Additionally, a number of rater characteristics beyond gender were measured, including ambivalent sexism attitudes of the raters, their judgments of complainant credibility, and self-referencing that might help explain rater judgments. Respondent gender, work environment, and community vs. student sample differences produced reliable differences in sexual harassment ratings in both the written and video trial versions of the study. The gender and sample differences in the sexual harassment ratings, however, are explained by a model which incorporates hostile sexism, perceptions of the complainant's credibility, and raters' own ability to put themselves in the complainant's position (self-referencing).