I have also served as an expert witness on sexual harassment cases: one involving a man who was gender-harassed, and another involving two female scientists who were victims of gender harassment.
I began studying sexual harassment in the early 1990s when it was still conceived largely as a problem of unwanted sexual behaviour and predation of men upon women in the workplace. This was on the heels of the Clarence Thomas Senate hearings and the Anita Hill controversy when sexual harassment was largely conceived in this way: being sexual in content, sexual in motive, and being something that men do to women.
I will go over my research that has given me an understanding of sexual harassment as largely a form of gender-based dominance and derogation in the workplace, what motivates sexual harassment, and how to prevent and address sexual harassment when it occurs.
My research began by studying sexual harassment against men in the workplace. At the time, in the early nineties, people started asking what about men? If sexual harassment is simply a method of making inappropriate comments sexually within the workplace, or propositioning people, then women can do this to men too, especially as they gain power within the workplace.
A popular movie in 1994 called Disclosure starred Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. It displayed sexual harassment against men in the form of a female boss coming on to him sexually, and there are also statistics coming out on sexual harassment against men that really, in my view and my colleagues' view, have overinflated its prevalence, because they simply gave men measures designed to study sexual harassment against women, what women found harassing, and asked them if they ever experienced it, such as lewd comments. Of course, men hear lewd comments in the workplace, but they don't necessarily find them harassing.
So we asked the question, do men experience harassment, and if so what kind do they experience in the workplace? With a few studies, we found that in general men do not experience what women experience as harassing in an harassing manner. So lewd comments, sexual attention, typically is not threatening to men—it is to women—but we did identify a form of harassment against men that previously had not been identified, and that was harassment against men for not being man enough in the workplace. This primarily came from other men, and it was experienced as the most threatening form of harassment to men, harassment that derogated them based on their status as men. So it involved masculinity teasing. One example is a man who took a two-week paternity leave after the birth of his second child and when he returned to work, he was teased so relentlessly about it that he feared for his status in the workplace.
I give you this background because it draws attention to the phenomenon of sexual harassment as being largely about a negotiation of gender within the workplace and a form of gender-based harassment, that is harassing people based on their gender performance, not necessarily their biological sex being male or female, but how well they performed their masculinity within the workplace, and potentially how well they performed their femininity in the workplace. So sexual harassment does not have to be sexual in content, does not have to come from someone of the other sex, to constitute sex discrimination. It can, and usually does, involve derogating someone based on their sex or their gender performance, and can be perpetuated by same-sex as well as other-sex others.
From this research, I went on to study this phenomenon in women. Is sexual harassment against women largely directed at women who also do not engage in prototypical feminine behaviour in the same way that it's directed at men? So again with three studies and a paper I published in 2007 entitled The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women, I demonstrated that it's primarily women who engage in masculine styles of behaviour, being assertive and being outspoken, who get targeted for unwanted sexual attention, sexual comments, and even sexual coercion within the workplace. I also demonstrated that having a masculine personality did not make women more sensitive to this kind of behaviour; that's not why they were reporting it. They were disproportionately targeted for this kind of behaviour.
In five organizations, I found that women in male-dominated ones were the most likely to be sexually harassed. That had already been demonstrated, but it was particularly the women with those masculine styles of behaviour, the women who were outspoken and assertive, who were disproportionately targeted for sexual harassment.
The conclusion from these studies was that it's women who do not meet feminine ideals who are targeted for traditional forms of sexual harassment. In the same way, men who do not meet masculine ideals are targeted for male forms of sexual harassment.
It's not a matter of women in male-dominated occupations being surrounded by men who are sexually attracted to them and therefore giving them unwanted sexual attention—that might be part of the problem—but it's largely women who are encroaching upon male territory, either occupationally or in their behaviour, who get targeted. Thus, sexual harassment serves to reinforce traditional gender roles and behaviour in both men and women by punishing those who veer outside the lines of gendered behaviour.
At the individual level, I theorize that sex-based harassment does not have to involve a conscious attempt necessarily to reinforce these roles and territories, but rather it is an attempt to protect or enhance one's personal status through gender. This is made possible because status is stratified by sex—being male is given more status than being female—and by gender, with masculinity being accorded higher status than femininity. Within gender there are privileged masculinities and privileged femininities, which give people the tools to put others down based upon these identities.
In the competitive world of work where people are vying for social status, which of course affects their professional status, this sex and gender stratification gives people the possibility to enhance their own status by putting others down based upon these identities.
I define sex-based harassment as behaviour that derogates, demeans, or humiliates an individual based on sex. Even behaviour that on the surface does not appear to be sex-based, that may not be sexual in content or nature, might constitute sexual harassment or sex-based harassment in this way if it's motivated by the desire to put someone down based upon that person's sex or their gender performance.
Recent research of mine shows that general mistreatment—ignoring somebody, putting down their work performance, which doesn't have anything to do with sexual content—is disproportionately targeted at gender deviance within the workplace. Women with masculine personalities are primarily targeted for mistreatment in general, not just sexual harassment, and men with feminine personalities, particularly in high-status masculine occupations, are disproportionately targeted for mistreatment in general.
This has led me to conduct research on other marginalized identities that make individuals deviate from gender ideals. For example, sexual deviants and sexual minorities are disproportionately targeted for sexual harassment. People who deviate from traditional family roles—for example, men who do a lot of caregiving in the home and women who do not have children—are disproportionately targeted for mistreatment in the workplace and sexual harassment.
I've also looked at racial deviance. Racial minorities are disproportionately targeted with sex-based harassment, and those who fail to conform to racial stereotypes are also targeted for more racial harassment in the same way that people who do not conform to gender stereotypes are disproportionately targeted for gender harassment.
This kind of behaviour in the workplace is a form of social control that keeps the status quo in place. Environments that trigger it are environments in which status is highly stratified by sex and gender, that is, male-dominated environments in which men outnumber women, but also when men have more power than women in that environment; and environments that reinforce distinctions between the sexes and the association between being male and having status; and also environments that motivate people to be in the “in group” or masculine club and to keep others out of it. Competitive environments are also much more prone to witnessing this type of harassing behaviour, where promotions are highly desired and difficult to obtain. People are going to use what they can to gain an advantage and will put others down based on sex and gender in order to do so.
Environments that trigger it also include leadership that does not explicitly call out and combat the problem, that is, leaders who are silent on the topic—neutrality tends to reinforce and side with the status quo—or ignore cases, or even reward and promote harassers and, obviously, leaders who engage in this behaviour themselves.
So what do we do? Prevention starts with leadership. Leadership sets the tone. Leaders have to acknowledge the inequality between groups within the workplace. Typically, when we're talking about sexual harassment, we're talking about men and women and the belief that this inequality is wrong. If the leader does not have “religion”, if people do not think the leader truly believes this in his or her heart, it's not going to have much of an effect.