SBP: Prototypes and Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Sexual harassment is widespread. It has harmful effects on its targets, including disengagement and withdrawal from work and school, decreased performance, and increased anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms that adversely affect health. The effects of sexual harassment extend beyond those personally targeted by these incidents. For example, it can undermine organizational outcomes, leading to a loss of human capital, reduced organizational diversity, lowered productivity and profits, and fiscal damages. To remedy the effects of sexual harassment and lessen these costs requires that people are able to perceive and recognize sexual harassment when it occurs. Yet research shows that sexual harassment is extremely under-reported both by its targets and by others in society. This project explores one important potential barrier that prevents individuals from perceiving sexual harassment. It focuses on people's mental images of womanhood, and how those mental images influence the perception of sexual harassment. The conceptual development of this project compares narrow mental images of traditional womanhood (as White, straight, traditionally feminine) with broader mental images of womanhood that include those who are not White, not straight, or not traditionally feminine. By uncovering ways to broaden the image of who experiences sexual harassment, sexual harassment should be more readily identified. Because identifying sexual harassment is fundamental to its resolution, understanding and addressing the barriers to perceiving sexual harassment is essential to the realization of civil rights as well as to reducing costs to individuals and society that exist when sexual harassment goes undetected. The project uses laboratory and field methods to investigate the relationship between images people possess about targets of sexual harassment and their images of womanhood. The studies consider whether images of sexual harassment targets overlap with images of traditional womanhood, and whether sexual harassment is more readily perceived by observers and potential targets the more closely women fit with the image of traditional womanhood. A final set of experiments explores whether broadening the image of the types of women who experience sexual harassment increases perceptions of sexual harassment targeting those who do not fit the traditional womanhood image. Participants in the studies include college students, non-student adults, and legal gatekeepers. Traditional womanhood is operationalized along personality dimensions that vary within women and using broader group identities (e.g., race, sexual orientation) that overlap to varying degrees with the traditional image of womanhood. The research will identify a potential barrier that prevents perceptions of sexual harassment, and will suggest low-cost solutions that can remove this barrier. This project will be helpful to scholars and practitioners who address civil rights law, as well as to organizations seeking to address sexual harassment. Evidence concerning best practices will be important in the development of more effective approaches to sexual harassment, ultimately improving workforce diversity and mitigating the deleterious effects of sexual harassment on its targets. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.