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How Do Sexual Harassment Policies Shape Gender Beliefs? An Exploration of the Moderating Effects of Norm Adherence and Gender
Abstract
Sexual harassment laws have led to important organizational changes in the workplace yet research continues to document resistance to their implementation and backlash against the people who mobilize such laws. Employing experimental research methods, this study proposes and tests a theory specifying the mechanisms through which sexual harassment policies affect gender beliefs. The findings show evidence that sexual harassment policies strengthen unequal gender beliefs among men and women most committed to traditional gender interaction norms. I also find that men and women's different structural locations in the status hierarchy lead to different, but related sets of concerns about the status threats posed by sexual harassment policies. By specifying the social psychological processes through which sexual harassment law affects beliefs about men and women, this study sets the stage for investigating ways to make laws designed to reduce inequality between social groups more effective.
... Policies that protect one group by punishing another group may elicit backlash arising from perceived threats to status and the underlying normative order. Such effects have been demonstrated in studies of sexual harassment policies, which have been shown to sometimes incite negative attitudes about women and reproduce gender stereotypes that encourage men's aggression and women's submissiveness (Tinkler, 2012(Tinkler, , 2013Tinkler et al., 2015;Tinkler, Li, & Mollborn, 2007). However, these unintended effects of such policies are not inevitable. ...
... Despite decades of research on perceptual deterrence and normative models of law, surprisingly little research has examined how the framing of laws in either deterrence or normative messages influences support for the law or related attitudes. Policy framing is particularly relevant for laws and policies that challenge existing status hierarchies, such as affirmative consent policies, since such edicts usually target deeply entrenched beliefs and interaction norms that favor some groups over others (Tinkler, 2013). Below, we develop the novel argument that punishment messaging is more effective at engendering support for an affirmative consent policy than is normative messaging but at the same time punishment messaging elicits stereotypical gender attitudes, which ultimately undermine policy effectiveness. ...
... It is worth noting that we find no support for this hypothesis among women. Prior research has shown that women's reactions to sexual harassment training are more complicated than men's (Tinkler, 2012(Tinkler, , 2013. This may also be the case in reactions to affirmative consent policies. ...
Colleges are increasingly adopting “affirmative consent” policies, which require students to obtain conscious and voluntary consent at each stage of sexual activity. Although this is an important step forward in violence prevention, very little is known about how best to present the policies to students. This is important, as research on sexual harassment policy training finds that training can reinforce traditional gender beliefs, which undermines policy goals. Building on this literature, we argue that affirmative consent policy trainings emphasizing punishment will increase support for affirmative consent but will reinforce traditional gender beliefs. We tested our predictions with an experiment in which we randomly assigned undergraduate participants to one of three conditions where they read an excerpt of (a) an affirmative consent policy that emphasized the threat of punishment, (b) an affirmative consent policy that emphasized a normative/moral message, or (c) an ergonomic workstation policy that served as our control condition. We found that punishment framing increased men’s support for the policy, had no effect on their likelihood to comply, and increased their perception that “most people” hold men to be more powerful than women. For women, the punishment and normative framings increased support equally, but the normative framing actually decreased likelihood to comply. The policy conditions had no effect on women’s gender beliefs. The results suggest that while an emphasis on punishment can help legitimate nonconsensual sex as a social problem, it will not necessarily increase college students’ compliance with affirmative consent, and runs the risk of activating essentialist stereotypes about gender difference. As the issue of campus sexual assault becomes increasingly politicized and contested, our findings highlight the need for more research.
... Narratives exist at all the levels of social reality: micro, meso and macro. At the individual level they are an essential element of self-structure, telling an agent what is his or her identity, what are his or her relations and obligations to others, what are the expected actions of others, what is the meaning of an object action or event, and what actions should be performed [34,44,52]. They also inform the achievement of goals and the consequences of actions. ...
... Narratives developed by individuals about themselves, where author of a narra- tive is also the foreground hero of it, are called auto-narratives [58]. Auto-narrative schemas determine the behaviour of individuals' social as well as economic actions, and influence the contents of narrative identity [33,44,52]. Special types of auto- narratives are simulations of the future, rich in scenarios for possible and desirable events. ...
... At a very deep level of adoption a narrative becomes included in a person's self-structure. It becomes a part of their personal identity, is used to structure and give meaning to personal experience and guides their decisions and actions [52]. The role an individual has, thanks to narrative, become a source of their identity and they enact this role in what they do. ...
Between 2011 and 2014 the European Non-Equilibrium Social Science
Project (NESS) investigated the place of equilibrium in the social sciences and
policy. Orthodox economics is based on an equilibrium view of how the economy
functions and does not offer a complete description of how the world operates.
However, mainstream economics is not an empty box. Its fundamental insight, that
people respond to incentives, may be the only universal law of behaviour in the
social sciences. Only economics has used equilibrium as a primary driver of system
behaviour, but economics has become much more empirical at the microlevel over
the past two decades. This is due to two factors: advances in statistical theory
enabling better estimates of policy consequences at the microlevel, and the rise of
behavioural economics which looks at how people, firms and governments really
do behave in practice. In this context, this chapter briefly reviews the contributions
of this book across the social sciences and ends with a discussion of the research
themes that act as a roadmap for further research. These include: realistic models
of agent behaviour; multilevel systems; policy informatics; narratives and decision
making under uncertainty; and validation of agent-based complex systems models.
... Although there is a strong legal and social consensus in the United States that the physically injurious rape of a stranger is wrong (Estrich 1986;Hoffman and Hardyman 1986), and that unwelcome touching, grabbing, and kissing should be illegal in the workplace (Tinkler 2008), many nonconsensual, sexually aggressive behaviors are largely tolerated and are a part of normal social interaction in specific settings. For example, sexually offensive public speech is commonplace and infrequently punished by law (Nielsen 2000). ...
... In the United States, serious legal sanctions for rape (Corrigan 2006;Decker and Baroni 2011;Beichner and Spohn 2012) and sexual harassment in the workplace (Dobbin and Kelly 2007;Tinkler 2008) suggest a strong cultural consensus exists against particular forms of nonconsensual sexual contact. In some states, the maximum punishment for rape is life imprisonment and it was not until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled against rape being a capital offense. ...
... We know that workplace sexual harassment laws have significantly changed behavior (Gruber 1998), but there is less evidence that the laws have changed gender attitudes (Bisom-Rapp 2001;Tinkler, Li, and Mollborn 2007;Tinkler 2012). Moreover, the research shows that when workplace sexual harassment laws are perceived to threaten gender interaction norms, people often respond by reifying gender stereotypes (Tinkler 2008;. Since people enjoy the bar scene and tend to normalize nonconsensual sexual contact, laws against such contact run this risk of inciting the type of resistance that sets gender equalizing beliefs back. ...
Unwelcome touching, groping, and kissing are illegal, but widely tolerated in public drinking settings. This contingency in the law's response means that patrons routinely negotiate the moral boundaries of nonconsensual sexual contact. We use 197 interviews with college-age individuals to examine the discursive strategies young people employ when negotiating those boundaries. We find that most interviewees have experiences with sexual aggression, do not categorize it as aggression, but advocate for stronger legal punishments against offenders. In accounting for this paradox, they draw on contradictory legal and cultural narratives that both normalize and condemn men's sexual aggression. We build on legal consciousness theories and gender theories by highlighting the complex ways that gender stereotypes enshrined in law are implicated in the construction of a social problem. We also contribute to the sociology of culture by explicating the often unconscious link between culture and action revealed in young people's narratives about sexual aggression.
... Finding little variation in the responses to the items in this scale, we used the "he didn't mean to" subscale in the fall 2017 and summer 2018 studies. 11 As we discuss in Online Appendix C, we also included items to replicate studies by Tinkler et al. (2015) and Tinkler (2013) showing that discussions of sexual harassment activate gender stereotypes. 12 Adding questions about sexism to the survey instrument required that we cut some other questions (see Online Appendix A). ...
... 21 Did the university's mandatory training produce a boomerang effect in certain people, which happens when a message produces a result that is the opposite of its intention (Byrne and Hart 2009)? Some studies show that policy discussions of sexual assault and harassment activate traditional gender stereotypes and trigger defensive reactions in participants, though reactions often vary between men and women and may depend on the gender identity of the trainer (Tinkler et al. 2015;Tinkler 2012Tinkler , 2013. Others suggest that training induces psychological reactance and may even cause some people to become more sexist (Bingham and Scherer 2001;Malamuth, Huppin, and Linz 2018;Tinkler 2012). ...
... Finding little variation in the responses to the items in this scale, we used the "he didn't mean to" subscale in the fall 2017 and summer 2018 studies. 11 As we discuss in Online Appendix C, we also included items to replicate studies by Tinkler et al. (2015) and Tinkler (2013) showing that discussions of sexual harassment activate gender stereotypes. 12 Adding questions about sexism to the survey instrument required that we cut some other questions (see Online Appendix A). ...
... 21 Did the university's mandatory training produce a boomerang effect in certain people, which happens when a message produces a result that is the opposite of its intention (Byrne and Hart 2009)? Some studies show that policy discussions of sexual assault and harassment activate traditional gender stereotypes and trigger defensive reactions in participants, though reactions often vary between men and women and may depend on the gender identity of the trainer (Tinkler et al. 2015;Tinkler 2012Tinkler , 2013. Others suggest that training induces psychological reactance and may even cause some people to become more sexist (Bingham and Scherer 2001;Malamuth, Huppin, and Linz 2018;Tinkler 2012). ...
The authors explore whether mandatory, universal, in-person sexual misconduct training achieves its goals to build knowledge about sexual assault and harassment and increase intentions to report episodes of assault. The authors present results from three studies with quasi-experimental designs as well as interviews with students and staff members at a diverse public university in the western United States. The surprising finding is that participating in training makes women students less likely to say they that will report experiences of sexual assault to university authorities. The training produces some small positive effects: students gain broader definitions of sexual misconduct and are less likely to endorse common rape myths, and women students express less sexist attitudes immediately after training. This study raises questions about whether one-shot training helps reduce sexual violence and increase reporting on college campuses and whether universities should invest in these types of training.
... onlookers, targets, perpetrators; e.g. Tinkler, 2013). Members of all these stakeholder groups engage in system justifications in response to sexual aggression, and these justifications feed attitudes that maintain or increase the likelihood of future sexual aggression-that maintain the status quo because it is viewed as just, legitimate and ideal (Kay et al., 2009). ...
... To date, we could only find a small stream of investigation into sexual harassment within a formal organizational, namely a collegiate, setting from an SJT perspective. A series of studies by Tinkler (2013) and Tinkler et al. (2007) demonstrated that sexual harassment training programs can actually cause people to entrench sex-relevant attitudes about men and women (e.g. women play hard to get), which contribute to justifying harassment actions which already happened. ...
Purpose
The status quo for managing deviant workplace behavior is underperforming. The current research offers a new approach for scholars and managers in approaching these misbehaviors. Namely, we outline how system justification theory, which holds that people are motivated to rationalize and justify the systems—including workplaces—to which they belong even when those systems disadvantage them or others, offers value in explaining and addressing the prevalence of such misbehaviors and contemporary failures in managing them.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual research explores the situated role of onlookers to patterns of workplace misbehavior, like harassment. We explore existing scholarship on why and how onlookers respond to such actions, including cultural elements, and draw parallels between those accounts and the foundational concepts of system justification theory to demonstrate an unrealized theoretical overlap valuable for its immediate applications in research.
Findings
The current paper establishes clear links between system justification theory and efforts to manage misbehavior, establishing system justifications as freezing forces in the culture of a workplace that must be unfrozen to successfully implement strategies for managing misbehavior. Further, we describe how organizational onlookers to misbehavior are subject to system justifications, which limit prescribed means of stopping these patterns of wrongdoing.
Originality/value
Very limited organizational scholarship has utilized system justification theory, despite calls for such applications. Given the existing shortcomings in scholarship and management approaches to workplace misbehavior, the current research breaks from the status quo and offers an established theory as a new way to approach these misbehaviors.
... Backlash can also accompany social changes designed to break down sources of gender inequalities, as reflected in the backlash accompanying the introduction of policies and programs designed to address sexual harassment, often from men and others interested in maintaining the existing gender hierarchy (e.g., Tinkler, 2012Tinkler, , 2013. The result may be reinforcement of traditional gendered belief systems, as workers who embrace traditional gender beliefs cling to them even tighter with the introduction of such programs (Tinkler, 2013). ...
... Backlash can also accompany social changes designed to break down sources of gender inequalities, as reflected in the backlash accompanying the introduction of policies and programs designed to address sexual harassment, often from men and others interested in maintaining the existing gender hierarchy (e.g., Tinkler, 2012Tinkler, , 2013. The result may be reinforcement of traditional gendered belief systems, as workers who embrace traditional gender beliefs cling to them even tighter with the introduction of such programs (Tinkler, 2013). Nonetheless, policies and procedures designed to address inappropriate workplace behavior do ultimately have a suppression effect on sexual harassment (Lopez, Hodson, & Roscigno, 2009), perhaps because they reduce the structural vulnerability of workers, especially those with less power. ...
Recent high‐profile cases of unwanted sexual attention in the workplace and the vibrancy of the associated #MeToo movement have drawn attention to the need to continue to explore workplace sexual harassment. In this article, we review existing literature on workplace sexual harassment, with an emphasis on the roles of power and structural vulnerability—key factors underlying sexual harassment. We argue for the need to contextualize structural vulnerabilities, with an eye towards uncovering how dimensions of power and vulnerability vary across workplaces, creating different mechanisms contributing to sexual harassment in specific contexts. With this backdrop, we then use the restaurant service industry as an example to illustrate the unique structural vulnerabilities workers are exposed to in this environment. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of continuing to investigate the dynamics of sexual harassment, especially with work that takes an intersectional approach.
... Activists such as Abd Alhamid similarly contend that the government adopts "cosmetic changes" but does not "really have the political will to fight sexual violence" or make substantive reforms to improve women's lives. 34 As scholars have widely discussed, legal and policy interventions do not necessarily transform gendered beliefs and practices and can even activate implicit gender bias or engender resistance when sociocultural norms are not undermined (Merry 1996, 62-63;Tinkler 2013Tinkler , 1269. While women will often use laws strategically, the laws position women as victims who require courts to save them. ...
... While women will often use laws strategically, the laws position women as victims who require courts to save them. They also constitute men as criminals, discouraging men and women from turning to the law (Merry 1996, 69;Tinkler 2013Tinkler , 1271. The anti-sexual harassment initiatives that emerged after the revolution favor direct intervention on the streets as more effective than legal and political change strategies for challenging gendered norms and practices, although activists also encourage women to seek redress through courts and policy. ...
... Therefore, because eliminating sexual harassment in the workplace is a gender-equalizing goal that can be resisted by those who hold gender stereotypical societal beliefs (Tinkler, 2013;Worthen, 2021), organizations must counter gendered beliefs through communication and training. For example, previous research shows that sensitizing messaging against sexual harassment within organizations increases the understanding and reaction to sexual harassment when compared to neutral messaging (Galesic & Tourangeau, 2007). ...
Despite increasing pressure to implement anti-sexual harassment policies, the issue remains largely unresolved within organizations in many countries. This mixed-methods study used a survey of 575 news professionals and an analysis of 17 anti-sexual harassment policies in Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to understand the effectiveness of anti-sexual harassment policies in preventing and correcting sexual harassment in the workplace. Results show no significant differences of experienced or reported sexual harassment between organizations with or without a policy. Only 30% of participants reported their experiences with organizations responding to 42% of reported cases. The only measured significant impact of policies was found with participants who had been trained on the policy and the likelihood for their organization to act. An analysis of the policies showed they contained unclear definitions, reporting mechanisms, complaint processes, organizational communication, and monitoring. In discussing these results, we highlight how gendered norms must be considered to implement more effective anti-sexual harassment policies.
... In contrast, gender harassment was unrelated to outcomes among STEM men. General scholarship on sexual harassment has indicated that institutional efforts to instill the belief that sexual harassment will be taken seriously, such as the introduction of sexual harassment policies and training, are sometimes met with a backlash from men (Tinkler, 2012(Tinkler, , 2013. While this may be the case, our findings suggest that men benefit from a climate that communicates sexual harassment will be taken seriously. ...
Despite the documented negative outcomes accompanying sexual harassment, the experience of sexual harassment among STEM faculty members remains underexamined. In this paper, we explore how two sexual harassment variables—gender harassment and sexual harassment climate—are linked to four facets of faculty well-being: job burnout, turnover intentions, psychological distress, and self-rated physical health. Using data from STEM faculty at a mid-sized university located in the upper Midwest (N = 117 faculty members), we find gender harassment is associated with lower self-rated physical health and higher turnover intentions among women STEM faculty. In contrast, gender harassment was not significant in predicting well-being outcomes among men STEM faculty. Instead, the sexual harassment climate features more prominently in the experiences of STEM men faculty, with the perception that sexual harassment charges will be treated seriously (the sexual harassment climate) being negatively related to men’s job burnout and psychological distress and positively related to men’s self-rated physical health. Taken together, our findings extend the existing literature by documenting that outcomes for STEM men faculty are more strongly shaped by the perceived institutional climate surrounding sexual harassment, whereas women’s outcomes are more intricately linked to experiencing gender harassment.
... Without explicit suggestion from the prompt that it was safe, reasonable, and acceptable to write about the role of their gender or underrepresented identities, students might not have felt comfortable with or even feared backlash for writing about their experiences or submitting their essays for study participation. 11,12 Our study team consisted of six women, three of whom identify as underrepresented in health care. Our team included two undergraduate students, one community pharmacist/PhD candidate, one academic pharmacist, and two academic physicians. ...
... When Annie sought assistance in handling her experience of harassment from the Ombudsman for Sexual Harassment, she was dismayed to find that this person was ill-prepared to address or resolve the problem. Indeed, research has shown that "top-down, one-shot" training, such as the lecture given by the Ombudsman, may provoke a backlash and actually strengthen "unequal gender beliefs" (Tinkler 2013;Tinkler, Gremillion, and Arthurs 2015). With the widespread assumption that sexual harassment takes place in an environment where a man has some type of power over a woman subordinate, it can be difficult to understand that sexual harassment can also come from other angles. ...
Sexism is pervasive in higher education. This paper explores one of the sites where academics learn how sexism structures the academy: the graduate teaching classroom. In this space, where teaching assistants are neither wholly students nor faculty, institutional power relations are ill-defined, and the power of cultural sexism is less constrained. We draw on our own experiences of sexual harassment as teaching assistants to interrogate our imbrication with the reproduction of sexism. As opposed to recent sexual harassment scandals perpetrated by men in institutional positions of power over women, we acknowledge a more holistic framing of sexual harassment: We experienced sexual harassment from our students. Following other feminist scholars, we catalogue our stories, and in revisiting them we bring attention to the complex structures of power in which they persist. Recognition of the spaces where we “learn” our place in these structures is imperative to feminist action.
... We assumed moderate effects (r d and r b, = .30) regarding the relation between precarious manhood and traditional gender beliefs, as well as between traditional gender beliefs and sexism, because similar associations were previously documented in experimental studies (Dasgupta and Rivera 2006;Tinkler 2013;O'Connor et al. 2017;Michniewicz and Vandello 2015). We entered the effect sizes for the association between collective narcissism and prejudice derogation based on a recent meta-analysis (r c = .20, ...
Results of three cross-sectional studies indicate that sexism in Poland is associated with collective narcissism—a belief that one’s own group’s (the in-group’s) exaggerated exceptionality is not sufficiently recognized by others—with reference to three social identities: male, religious, and national. In Study 1 (n = 329), male collective narcissism was associated with sexism. This relationship was sequentially mediated by precarious manhood and traditional gender beliefs. In Study 2 (n = 877), Catholic collective narcissism predicted tolerance of violence against women (among men and women) over and above religious fundamentalism and in contrast to intrinsic religiosity. In Study 3 (n = 1070), national collective narcissism was associated with hostile sexism among men and women and with benevolent sexism more strongly among women than among men. In contrast, national in-group satisfaction—a belief that the nation is of a high value—predicted rejection of benevolent and hostile sexism among women but was positively associated with hostile and benevolent sexism among men. Among men and women collective narcissism was associated with tolerance of domestic violence against women, whereas national in-group satisfaction was associated with rejection of violence against women.
... We assumed moderate effects (r d and r b, = .30) regarding the relation between precarious manhood and traditional gender beliefs, as well as between traditional gender beliefs and sexism, because similar associations were previously documented in experimental studies (Dasgupta and Rivera 2006;Tinkler 2013;O'Connor et al. 2017;Michniewicz and Vandello 2015). We entered the effect sizes for the association between collective narcissism and prejudice derogation based on a recent meta-analysis (r c = .20, ...
Results of three cross-sectional studies indicate that sexism in Poland is associated with collective narcissism—a belief that one’s own group’s (the in-group’s) exaggerated exceptionality is not sufficiently recognized by others—with reference to three social identities: male, religious, and national. In Study 1 (n = 329), male collective narcissism was associated with sexism. This relationship was sequentially mediated by precarious manhood and traditional gender beliefs. In Study 2 (n = 877), Catholic collective narcissism predicted tolerance of violence against women (among men and women) over and above religious fundamentalism and in contrast to intrinsic religiosity. In Study 3 (n = 1070), national collective narcissism was associated with hostile sexism among men and women and with benevolent sexism more strongly among women than among men. In contrast, national in-group satisfaction—a belief that the nation is of a high value—predicted rejection of benevolent and hostile sexism among women but was positively associated with hostile and benevolent sexism among men. Among men and women collective narcissism was associated with tolerance of domestic violence against women, whereas national in-group satisfaction was associated with rejection of violence against women.
... But brief, generic, online-only trainings do not effect lasting change in belief or behavior (19). And they can backfire by bolstering gender stereotypes and backlashes against women (20,21). ...
... Egalitarian gender-based policies and laws have previously been found to positively impact norms regarding women' s equality and empowerment at the national and sub-national level [21][22][23]. There is evidence of an association between violence norms and adverse health outcomes, including IPV, and some studies have suggested that one cannot fully understand the causes of IPV without first examining the social context in which it occurs [24][25][26]. ...
Background:
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a multi-national problem with many health consequences. Some research suggests that reducing rates of child marriage can improve gender norms and health outcomes related to IPV. Here, we examine whether changes in national child marriage laws can improve attitudes about domestic violence and reduce intimate partner violence at scale.
Methods:
Data on attitudes towards violence and violence experienced were obtained from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and longitudinal data on child marriage policy from WORLD and MACHEquity databases (1995-2012). Treatment countries were included if they improved their national child marriage policies from harmful (under 18) to more protective and control countries were included if they had a constant child-marriage policy that allowed girls to marry under the age of 18. Our final data set included 5 treatment and 14 control countries for women's outcomes, 2 treatment and 9 control countries for men's outcomes and 2 treatment and 7 control countries for IPV outcomes (for which fewer countries collect data). We combined individual level responses to five questions on attitudes about domestic violence to create a scale from 0 (always unacceptable) to 5 (always acceptable). All analyses employed a difference-in-differences approach adjusting for individual and country level predictors.
Results:
Data were available for 532 255 women, of which 96 414 also completed the domestic violence modules, and 104 704 men. National changes to a protective child marriage policy were associated with improved attitudes towards violence among women (-0.21 points, 95% confidence interval (CI) = -0.28, -0.14) and men (-0.98 points, 95% CI = -1.13, -0.83). Additionally, the risk of women experiencing physical and sexual abuse reduced by a greater proportion in treatment compared to control countries (odds ratio OR = 0.65, 95% CI = 0.50, 0.84; OR = 0.63, 95% CI = 0.45, 0.88, respectively).
Conclusions:
Our large multi-national study is the first of its kind to critically evaluate the role of national policy on attitudes towards and experiences of IPV among both men and women, and finds that these laws have protective outcomes. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that gender egalitarian laws positively influence norms and health at the national level.
... Pina, Gannon, and Saunders 2009) and the ramifications for the broader work environment usually are missing. A weak or non-existent theoretical contextualization of sexual harassment combined with a lack of relevant knowledge (Tinkler 2013)in other words an inability to describe the problem of sexual harassment in all its complexity (in particular feminist perspectives on intersectionality and links to related forms of gender-based violence in higher education)further weakens both research on policy and policies as tools to prevent sexual harassment. There is clearly a gap between neoliberal, bureaucratic policy and critical knowledge on experiences of sexual harassment in a normative academic culture (Brorsen Smidt et al. 2018). ...
Sexual harassment is an epidemic throughout global higher education systems and impact individuals, groups and entire organizations in profound ways. Precarious working conditions, hierarchical organizations, a normalization of gender-based violence, toxic academic masculinities, a culture of silence and a lack of active leadership are all key features enabling sexual harassment. The aim of this study is to review scientific knowledge on sexual harassment in higher education. A thematic focus is on (a) knowledge derived from top-ranked peer-reviewed articles in the research field, (b) the prevalence of sexual harassment among students and staff, (c) reported consequences of sexual harassment, (d) examples of primary, secondary and tertiary preventive measures, and (e) core challenges to research on sexual harassment in higher education. The published research evidence suggests several findings of importance, mainly: (a) prevalence of sexual harassment among students is reported by on average one out of four female students; (b) severe consequences of sexual harassment impacts individuals but the effects on the quality in research and education is unknown; (c) there is almost no evidence supporting the supposed effects of major preventive measures; and (d) research on sexual harassment in higher education lacks theoretical, longitudinal, qualitative and intersectional approaches and perspectives.
... Public-education campaigns to disseminate scientific facts and change opinions about climate change, Barack Obama's birthplace, and gun laws may induce people to hold more tightly to their views, especially if they are motivated by partisanship (Flynn, Nyhan, and Reifler 2017;Kahan et al. 2012). By heightening the salience of gender and sexuality in social contexts, sexual-misconduct training can activate traditional gender stereotypes (Tinkler 2012;2013), while affirmative consent standards, which classify much ambiguous behavior as assault, may reduce women's willingness to report their experiences (Htun et al. 2018). ...
Organizations—from academic and professional associations to private corporations and police forces—face challenges promoting diversity and inclusion among their workers and affiliates. Instead of training and regulations, recent research recommends mechanisms that engage managers and leaders in activities that involve behavioral changes. This article describes how we put the managerial engagement approach into practice by organizing a “Diversity and Inclusion Hackathon” at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. With 11 teams focused on a range of topics, the hackathon attracted more than 200 people and produced multiple outputs. It engaged scholars from a range of backgrounds, social identities, institutions, ranks, and beliefs in the generation of new norms, programmatic ideas, and plans for the profession. Although we cannot infer causality, analysis of the APSA Annual Meeting evaluation survey reveals that hackathon participants are significantly more likely to express positive perceptions of the conference.
... d.). The form and content of some trainings may reinforce sexist beliefs (Tinkler, 2013(Tinkler, , 2018Tinkler, Li, & Mollborn, 2007 In sum, university policies vary by institution, and some may actually cause harm. In the following section, I will summarize social movements that address campus sexual violence and review gender and law and society scholarship on social movements and institutions. ...
In the last 8 years, activist pressure has increased attention to sexual violence at universities. Most recently, the #MeToo movement has widened the conversation about sexual violence. This increased public attention has coincided with changes in federal guidelines, state laws, and campus policies on sexual violence as well as social movement activity by survivor‐activists and emerging counter‐movements. I argue that sociologists—specifically researchers who study gender and/or law and society—are uniquely situated to contribute to the study of sexual violence on campus. I synthesize a growing sociological and interdisciplinary literature on sexual violence—legal changes, policy effects, and social movement struggles—in order to advocate that sociologists study laws, campus policies, and social movements simultaneously.
... Furthermore, studies on sexual violence show that in some situations, training programmes, policies and reporting systems have been insufficient and even aggravated the problem, while reinforcing gender stereotypes (EEOC 2016;Tinkler 2013). Notably, men with a high inclination to harass women can be more resistant to training on sexual harassment prevention and have worse attitudes towards harassment after the training (Robb and Doverspike 2001). ...
Gender equality lies at the heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which asserts gender equality as both a fundamental human right and a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world.
The evidence collected in this discussion paper shows that gender equality is critical to achieving a wide range of objectives pertaining to sustainable development. These include promoting economic growth and labour productivity, reducing poverty, enhancing human capital through health and education, attaining food security, addressing climate change impacts and strengthening resilience to disasters, and ensuring more peaceful and inclusive communities. It therefore argues that accelerating gender equality in all spheres of society leads to a more rapid increase in progress towards achieving the 2030 Agenda.
... That is, in an implicit associations test, participants who read the sexual harassment policy more closely linked "male" with "high status" and "female" with "low status" than did participants in the control group. In a related study by Tinkler (2013), she found that after undergraduate students watched a video on preventing sexual harassment, participants--men and women--who strongly adhered to gender norms only strengthened their implicit attitudes about gender stereotypes following the intervention. ...
When training backfires and what can be done about it - Volume 12 Issue 1 - Logan M. Steele, Joseph A. Vandello
... 15. Research on sexual harassment and misconduct training similarly finds that, by increasing the salience of gender, the curriculum can reinforce traditional gender stereotypes (Tinkler 2012(Tinkler , 2013Htun et al. 2018). ...
What explains the scarcity of women and under-represented minorities among university faculty relative to their share of Ph.D. recipients? Among many potential explanations, we focus on the “demand” side of faculty diversity. Using fully randomized conjoint analysis, we explore patterns of support for, and resistance to, the hiring of faculty candidates from different social groups at two large public universities in the U.S. We find that faculty are strongly supportive of diversity: holding other attributes of (hypothetical) candidates constant, for example, faculty at both universities are between 11 and 21 percentage points more likely to prefer a Hispanic, black, or Native American candidate to a white one. Furthermore, preferences for diversity in faculty hiring are stronger among faculty than among students. These results suggest that the primary reason for the lack of diversity among faculty is not a lack of desire to hire them, but the accumulation of implicit and institutionalized biases, and their related consequences, at later stages in the pipeline.
... Houle, Staff, Mortimer, Uggen& Blackstone(Kayuni, 2009) Emo, Restaino, Perkins, Neveln & Harrington, (2015Vega-Geo, OrtegaRuiz and Sanchez (2016),(Risley-Curtiss& Hudsonn, 1998) (Risley-Curtiss& Hudson, 1998;Kyleholt, (2002;Willness et al., 2007(O`Donohue, Downs& Yeater,1998Risley-Curtiss& Hudson, 1998, (Mamaru, Getachew& Mohammed, 2015) (Kyleholt, 2002), (Willness et al., 2007)Gruber & Fineran, 2015(Settles,. Harrell1,Southwick et al., (2014(Schumm, Briggs-Phillips, & Hobfoll, 2006(Hauck, Schestatsky, Terra, Kruel&Ceitlin, 2007(al., 2013;(Segal, 2009(Bonanno, 2004Negative affect Social inhibition (Kunst& (Bon-Martens, 2011(Denollet, 2000(Oginska(Bulik, 2006(Denollet, 1998, 2005Oginska-Bulik, 2006) (Denollet, 1998Denollet, , 2005) (Geuensa Braspenninga, Van Bogaert, (Franck, 2015;Oginska-Bulik, 2006(Pedersen & Denollet, 2003;Polman et (al., 2010(Geuensa et al., 2015Oginska-Bulik, 2006(Polman et al., 2010 ...
هدف الدراسة الراهنة هو الكشف عن الفروق بين الذكور والإناث في كل من الاستهداف كضحايا للتحرش الجنسي ودرجة الصمود لهذا التحرش، بالإضافة إلى الكشف عن درجة تباين الصمود في ضوء كل من نمط الشخصية "د" ومعدل التحرش, كما اختبرت الدراسة النموذج المنبئ بالصمود لدى ضحايا التحرش. وذلك على عينة تكونت من 1181 مشاركاً في عمر يتراوح بين 11: 70 عاما. وباستخدام مقاييس الدراسة التي تمثلت في: مقياس الصمود، ومقياس الاستهداف للتحرش، ومقياس نمط الشخصية "د" وباستخدام الأساليب الإحصائية المناسبة. أظهرت النتائج ما يلي: 1. وجود فارق دال إحصائيا بين متوسطي درجات الذكور والإناث في معدل الاستهداف للتحرش الجسمي (الضرب في أماكن حساسة بالجسم) في اتجاه الذكور، 2. وجود فارق دال إحصائيا بين متوسطي درجات الذكور والإناث في معدل الاستهداف للتحرش الجسمي (اللمس بطريقة غير أخلاقية) في اتجاه الإناث، 3. وجود فارق دال إحصائيا بين متوسطي درجات الذكور والإناث على الصمود في اتجاه الذكور، 4. تباين الصمود لدى ضحايا التحرش في ضوء نمط الشخصية "د"، 5. تباين الصمود لدى ضحايا التحرش في ضوء معدل الاستهداف، و6. تنبأ كل من الوجدان السلبي والكف الاجتماعي ونوع التحرش (اللمس بطريقة غير أخلاقية) ومستوى التعليم ومعدل الاستهداف ونمط الشخصية "د" والفئة العمرية بدرجة الصمود لدى عينة الذكور، في حين تنبأ معدل الاستهداف والكف الاجتماعي ونوع التحرش والوجدان السلبي بدرجة الصمود لدى عينة الإناث. وقد تم مناقشة النتائج في ضوء الإطار النظري والدراسات السابقة والتطبيقات العملية لها.
المفاهيم الأساسية: الاستهداف للتحرش الجنسي، الصمود، نمط الشخصية "د"، الكف الاجتماعي، الوجدان السلبي
... 15. Research on sexual harassment and misconduct training similarly finds that, by increasing the salience of gender, the curriculum can reinforce traditional gender stereotypes (Tinkler 2012(Tinkler , 2013Htun et al. 2018). ...
... Training and information campaigns related to gender equality legislation and policies, in general, or to sexual harassment, in particular, raise people's sensitivity for recognizing and classifying acts as potentially sexually harassing (USMSPB, 1994). By means of an experimental design, Tinkler (2013) showed, however, that the implementation of sexual harassment policies can negatively strengthen unequal gender beliefs of both men and women who are most committed to traditional gender interaction norms. With this in mind, the design and messaging of campaigns need to be informed by evidence about their impact. ...
Sexual harassment is recognised as discrimination on the grounds of sex and as a breach of the principle of equal treatment between men and women. The FRA survey on violence against women shows, however, that sexual harassment remains a pervasive and common experience for many women in the European Union (EU). Dependent on the type of incident recorded, an estimated 83 to 102 million women (45 % to 55 % of women) in the 28 EU Member States have experienced at least one form of sexual harassment since the age of 15. It also becomes apparent that many women do not talk with anyone about their experiences of sexual harassment, and very few report the most serious incidents to their hierarchy at work or to a responsible authority. Sexual harassment occurs in various settings and uses different means, such as the internet. The FRA survey results indicate that sexual harassment against women involves a range of different perpetrators and includes the use of ‘new’ technologies. The survey shows that sexual harassment disproportionately affects younger women, and that it is more commonly perceived and experienced by women with a university degree and women in the highest occupational groups. The article outlines key findings from the FRA Violence against Women Survey with regard to the extent, forms and consequences of sexual harassment in the EU. It offers a critical discussion of existing definitions and measurements of sexual harassment, underlines how these significantly influence the reported prevalence rates in official or survey data, and points to relevant factors which explain the observed individual and country differences.
... Secondly, there are unforeseen contextual and systemic factors that might lead to unintended consequences. Consider the case of the weak impact of sexual harassment policies on reducing gender bias in organisations [52]. In this case, while these policies were originally designed to reduce gender bias in the workplace, they actually strengthened traditional discrimination norms (e.g. they reinforced males' prejudices that females are protected by law because they are less competent), increased paternalistic stereotypes in organisations and induced females to correspond to the typical male stereotype of victims in order to take advantage of these norms. ...
This chapter aims to discuss certain limitations of the dominant equilibrium thinking in policy and explore more complexity-friendly alternatives. If societies and markets are viewed as complex, non-equilibrium systems, understanding nonlinear, adaptive and evolving patterns emerging from agent behaviour in network structures is fundamental for policy purposes. This requires improved realism of the behavioural and social foundations on which policies are based. We must also reconsider the mantra of incentivisation, institutional design and the top-down regulation that typically dominates conventional policy. Recent cases of financial market regulation and health policies can help us to understand the importance of looking at the subtle ways in which people or organisations behave when exposed to social influence, and pre-existing social norms and network externalities. Changing the current policy narrative and exploring complexity-friendly concepts, instruments and methods requires a shift of focus of policy-making from forecast and prediction of system equilibrium in order to understand and manage complex social systems better.
Life in society revolves around social norms. These norms play a crucial role in regulating and influencing individuals’ behavior, both at the societal and individual levels. They offer a psychological framework that reduces uncertainty, guides behavior, and aids people in adapting to their social surroundings. Moreover, by observing prevailing social norms, individuals gain insights into societal trends that preserve cherished values and traditions across generations, thus mapping the dynamics of social stability and change. Social change is closely tied to shifts in these norms, which can occur at varying speeds, influenced by factors at multiple levels of analysis, including societal, group, and individual levels. In this article, I analyze the various concepts of social norms found in the literature, with a particular focus on their role in psychology. I describe the main sources of normative influence and illustrate, with multiple examples, how they operate in different social contexts. In this way, I address how these norms guide and facilitate participation in collective actions, their intergenerational transmission, and their role in the emergence of radicalization in social protest contexts. Furthermore, I delve into how group norms are linked to intergroup contact experiences involving both advantaged and disadvantaged group members, as well as the expression of prejudice and affective polarization. I conclude by emphasizing the necessity of adopting a multilevel approach to comprehend the connection between norms and social change.
This study discusses adolescents’ perceptions of ICT-facilitated sexual violence (ICTFSV) based on gender and school type. The research was conducted by surveying 719 students in seven regencies/cities in Surakarta, Indonesia, which were purposively selected. The ICTFSV indicator was measured based on the theories of Henry & Powell (2016) and Baumgartner et al. (2010). Mann-Whitney U and two-sided tests were employed to analyze the data. This study finds the different perceptions of ICTFSV based on gender at SHS and VHS. Moreover, it also finds the different perceptions of ICTFSV among students of SHS and VHS. This provides a new understanding of gender-perspective integration and character-building in developing school policies. Therefore, further research on gender equality and character-building of education policy can be carried out. The analyzed object imposes many limitations, namely the selected sample, the research focus, the data collecting, and analyzing method.
In response to new regulations, universities have created multiple options for managing sexual misconduct complaints. These options are described as maximizing survivors’ autonomy through feminist paradigms of choice. This study uses data from ethnographic observation and 76 interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and administrators to examine whether providing options gave survivors control over their complaints. Findings indicate that survivors found the complicated and vague sexual misconduct policies overwhelming and confusing. As a result, they became dependent on university actors in decision‐making, giving the university more control over survivors’ complaints as institutional actors guided survivors to options that required minimal university action.
With the #MeToo movement generating renewed public attention to the problem of sexual misconduct, it is an important time to assess how sexual harassment training affects men's motivation to work with women. We conducted an experiment in which we exposed undergraduate men to sexual harassment policy training and then assessed their motivation to work with a female partner on a decision-making task. We employed a 2 × 2 design in which participants were randomly assigned to a policy condition (sexual harassment policy or control) and a team role (leader or subordinate). We found that policy training did not affect whether participants chose a female or male partner. However, we found that policy training led male participants to rate female partners as more dissimilar to them and that leadership status moderated the effect of policies on men's expressed anxiety about working with a female partner. Findings have implications for reducing sexual harassment and gender inequality.
Sexual harassment in the workplace is a prevalent issue, with 60% of women reporting that they have experienced workplace sexual harassment. In this chapter, the authors offer the bystander intervention as a strategy for preventing and coping with sexual harassment at work. Bystander intervention behavior can include removing a victim from a harassing situation, speaking up to a harasser, or reporting the harasser on behalf of the victim. Bystander intervention trainings have the ability to give men the perception of psychological standing in the issue of sexual harassment. Positive deviance can be a large factor in bystander interventions. Bystander intervention trainings are also shown to positively change perceptions on issues of gender equity and sexual harassment. Traditional sexual harassment trainings that simply go over policies can actually reinforce gender stereotypes, and it is not clear that they change attitudes or behavior surrounding sexual harassment.
Firms often ask supervisors to appraise subordinates’ potential to succeed in higher-level positions. These appraisals can take place within social and organizational contexts that emphasize improving the experiences of females in male-dominated settings. Using this context, we experimentally examine whether supervisors differentially interpret and use the same accounting information when appraising the potential of subordinates of different genders. We draw on attribution theory and research suggesting that a diversity emphasis sends two conflicting signals—females are less able than males, but more valuable from a diversity standpoint. We find that supervisors’ beliefs about subordinates’ abilities in their current positions are lower for female than male subordinates. While prior research suggests this should result in supervisors appraising female subordinates’ potential as lower than males’, we find the opposite. Our results suggest that firm efforts to improve the workplace experiences of females may do little to mitigate underlying gender stereotypes.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the United States: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. Although women’s demands for support seem to have pushed the Biden administration to propose more expansive family policies, stereotypes and norms that marginalize care work and care workers within families and across the economy also need to change to achieve equality for women.
Sexual harassment was once conceptualized solely as a sexual problem: coercive sexual advances that spring from natural feelings of sexual desire or romance. Research has since shown that by far the most common manifestation of sexual harassment is gender harassment, which has contempt at its core; this conduct aims to put people down and push them out, not pull them into sexual activity. With findings such as these, we have made many strides in the scientific study of sexual harassment. That body of scholarship is the focus of this article, which is organized around the following questions: What is sexual harassment, both behaviorally and legally? How common is this conduct in work organizations, and what are its consequences? What features of the social/organizational context raise the risk for sexual harassment? What are some promising (and not-so-promising) solutions to this pervasive problem? And finally, what are important directions for this area of research moving forward?
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Organizational Pscyhology and Organizational Behavior, Volume 8 is January 21, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Public attention to sexual harassment has increased sharply with the rise of the #MeToo movement, although the phenomenon has sustained strong scientific and policy interest for almost 50 years. A large and impressive interdisciplinary scholarly literature has emerged over this period, yet the criminology of sexual harassment has been slow to develop. This review considers how criminological theory and research can advance knowledge on sexual harassment—and how theory and research on sexual harassment can advance criminological knowledge. We review classic and contemporary studies and highlight points of engagement in these literatures, particularly regarding life-course research and violence against women. After outlining prospects for a criminology of sexual harassment that more squarely addresses perpetrators as well as victims, we discuss how criminological insights might contribute to policy efforts directed toward prevention and control.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 4 is January 13, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) workforce has long suffered from a lack of diversity. In addition to unequal representation of all members of the public during recruitment, the prevalence of bias, discrimination, and harassment continue to affect success and retention of women and members of underserved communities in the STEM workforce. Harassment and other exclusionary behaviors persist due to institutional structures that favor majority groups, perpetuation of power imbalances in the current research training and funding models, and inadequate attitudes and policies against misconduct. The ADVANCEGeo Partnership is a collaboration among the American Geophysical Union, the Association for Women Geoscientists, and the Earth Science Women's Network to generate systemic change in the geosciences through a multi-level approach to transform workplace climate. The ADVANCEGeo Partnership contributes at the institutional level by addressing academic climate and cultures through the leadership of scientific societies and on campus efforts, and structurally, through policies and processes that guide professional conduct and response to hostile behaviors. The Partnership also contributes to individual growth, education and empowerment of all members of the scientific community via bystander intervention and workplace climate trainings. In this chapter, we discuss major factors that contribute to persistence of harassment in academic institutions, impacts of harassment, and solutions that the community can adopt to address these issues based upon the work of the ADVANCEGeo Partnership.
Theorizing situates bystander intervention approaches to combatting street sexual harassment as either an anti-carceral mode of social justice concerned with citizen responsibility and reshaping community norms or a carceral practice that shifts forms and sites of penal power. This article examines the intersection and effect of carceral and anti-carceral framing techniques in the 2015 “The Harasser is a Criminal” media campaign deployed by the Egyptian anti-sexual harassment initiative HarassMap to promote bystander intervention. Situated within a sphere of Egyptian gender activism that is transnational, secular, and feminist-oriented, and operating within a militarized, authoritarian political context, HarassMap’s campaign complicates how bystander intervention is instrumentalized as a technology of power to shape subjective and intersubjective responses to Egypt’s street sexual harassment problem. Carceral and anti-carceral currents flow together in their campaign not to promote a reliance on police or juridical structures for redress, but to cultivate new ethical dispositions as a means of mobilizing individuals to act. Through the figure of the bystander, HarassMap is engaged in a biopolitical project which seeks to create new neoliberal subjects who police themselves and assume responsibility for their own behavior in public space.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the relationship between workplace gender diversity among peers and management aspirations among male and female employees. It focuses on whether gender diversity influences men and women’s management aspirations.
Design/methodology/approach
The study builds on cross-sectional survey data from the Danish public sector.
Findings
Results shows that in mixed-gender workplaces, male employees are less likely to express management aspirations than male employees in mono-gender workplaces, but female employees in mixed-gender workplaces express management aspirations to the same – low – degree as female employees in mono-gender workplaces. All in all, the findings show that gender differences in career aspirations are not just a matter of individual preferences and/or macro-structural factors but also a matter of factors at organizational level. The findings suggest both positive and negative implications of gender diversity, and hence problematize a – rather common – simplistic celebration of gender diversity. First of all, gender diversity seems to counteract the fertilization of rigid stereotypes of men and hence prevents some men from being pushed into management positions and a career ladder they perhaps do not want to be placed at in the first place.
Research limitations/implications
Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.
Practical implications
The findings seem to identify that the challenge of secure a large and qualified pool of potential managers might be even extra challeging for managers in gender-diverse organisations.
Originality/value
A more nuanced view of the implications of gender diversity based on a basic argument of gender-asymmetry. Furthermore, the study are build on a unique dataset that allows to study the implications of gender diversity across a wide range of occupational setting and hence control for occupation specific characteristics.
Using a technique known as network meta-analysis that is new to psychological science, we synthesized evidence from 494 studies (80,356 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of different procedures to change implicit bias, and their effects on explicit bias and behavior. We found that implicit bias can be changed, but the effects are often weak (|ds| < .30). Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit bias the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit bias the least. Most procedures were brief and were tested within a single experimental session, and funnel plot analyses suggested that the effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Many procedures changed explicit bias, but to a smaller degree than they changed implicit bias. We found no evidence of change in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit bias did not mediate changes in explicit bias or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in measured implicit bias are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit bias or behavior. We discuss potential interpretations of these findings, including the possibility that current manipulations change non-associative aspects of implicit measures and the possibility that the automatic retrieved associations do not influence explicit biases or behavior.
The current study examined gender differences in sexual harassment victimization and resilience, and resilience variance according to type D personality and sexual harassment frequency. The study also examined the model predicts victims' resilience. The sample consisted of 1181 participants aged between 11-70 year. Using the study scales, the results showed that: 1.There were gender differences in sexual harassment victimization and resilience, 2. Education level, age, type of sexual harassment, type D personality, social inhibition and negative affect accounted for significant variation in male victims' resilience. While sexual harassment frequency, social inhibition and negative affect accounted for significant variation in female victims' resilience. The results were discussed in light of previous studies.
Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures’ effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.
Research shows that exposure to sexual harassment policy sometimes activates traditional gender stereotypes. This article examines whether the sex of the legal messenger moderates reactions to the enforcement of sexual harassment laws. We employ a 2 × 2 experimental design in which we measure the effect of a sexual harassment policy intervention on male participants’ gender beliefs. The design varies whether the person communicating the policy information is male or female. We find that female policy trainers activate implicit gender stereotypes, but explicit gender egalitarian beliefs. Other than improving men's perceptions of women's considerateness, the policy has little effect on beliefs in the conditions with a male trainer. These results suggest that the effect of law on social change is contingent on characteristics of the legal messengers. Findings contribute to our understanding of gender inequality and legitimacy processes and have practical implications for implementing effective policy.
More than half a century has passed since the publication of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy , Gunnar Myrdal's agonizing portrait of the pervasiveness of racially prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices in American life. Central to Myrdal's work was the paradox posed by the coexistence of race-based social, economic, and political inequality on the one hand, and the cherished American cultural values of freedom and equality on the other. In the five decades since the publication of this work, there has been a dramatic decline in white Americans' overt expressions of anti-black and anti-integrationist sentiments and in many of the inequalities Myrdal highlighted in his monumental work. Yet the persistence of racial antipathy is evidence of the continuing dilemma of race in American society. This collection of original essays by leading race relations experts focuses on the recent history and current state of racial attitudes in the United States. It addresses key issues and debates in the literature, and it includes chapters on the racial attitudes of African-Americans as well as whites. The volume will be of great importance to students and scholars concerned with the sociology and politics of contemporary American race relations.
In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.
Although it has hardly disappeared, gender inequality in the labor market has declined noticeably in recent decades, by most standard indicators. Inequality is declining in labor-force participation rates, wages, and occupational sex segregation, even though considerable sex segregation remains, especially at the job and firm level (Jacobs 1999; Petersen and Morgan 1995; Reskin and Padavic 1999). A debate now centers on the nature of the forces behind these changes and their implications for the future. Are the forces that have been and are undermining gender inequality now unstoppable, as recent arguments posit (Jackson 1998)? Is the significance of gender as an organizing principle of inequality in society declining as a consequence? If there are forces that continue to reproduce gender inequality, what do they consist of and what is their future?.
Drawing on recent insights from the study of legal consciousness and gender relations, the authors test the generality of Catharine MacKinnon's theory of the sexual harassment of adult women. Survey and interview data from the Youth Development Study and the General Social Survey are analyzed to identify a behavioral syndrome of sexual harassment for males and females during adolescence and young adulthood and to compare the syndrome against subjective reports of sexual harassment. A clear harassment syndrome is found for all age and sex groups and MacKinnon's predictions about the influence of workplace power and gender relations are generally supported. Financially vulnerable men as well as women are most likely to experience harassing behaviors, and men pursuing more egalitarian gender relationships are most likely to identify such behaviors as sexual harassment. Nevertheless, adult women remain the most frequent targets of classic sexual harassment markers, such as unwanted touching and invasion of personal space.
Emphasis on tracking and ability grouping as sources of inequality and as goals for reform ignores processes of stratification within heterogeneous classrooms. Research literature on effects of classroom status inequality is reviewed. The article presents a test of two interventions derived from expectation states theory and designed to counteract the process of stratification in classrooms using academically heterogeneous small groups. The design focuses on variation in the frequency with which teachers carried out status treatments in 13 elementary school classrooms, all of which were using the same curriculum and the same system of classroom management. There was good support for the hypotheses that the use of status treatments would be associated with higher rates of participation of low-status students and would have no effect on the participation of high-status students. Analysis at the classroom level revealed that more frequent use of these treatments was associated with more equal-status interaction.
That women tend to see harassment where men see harmless fun or normal gendered interaction is one of the more robust findings in sexual harassment research. Using in-depth interviews with employed men and women, this article argues that these differences may be partially explained by the performative requirements of masculinity. The ambiguous practice of “girl watching” is centered, and the production of its meaning analyzed. The data suggest that men's refusal to see their behavior as harassing may be partially explained through the objectification and attenuated empathy that the production of masculine identities may require. Thus, some forms of harassment and their interpretations may more accurately be seen as acts of ignoring than states of ignorance (of the effects of the behavior or the law). Implications for anti-sexual harassment policies and training are explored.
In spite of the relative success of equal opportunity laws on women's status in the workplace, we know little about the influence of such legal interventions on people's attitudes and beliefs. This paper focuses, in particular, on how sexual harassment policy affects men's beliefs about the gender hierarchy. We employ an experimental design in which we measure the effect of a policy intervention on men's explicit and implicit gender beliefs. Results show that the sexual harassment policy did not alter explicit gender beliefs. Explicit beliefs changed in a different way, however. Compared to the baseline condition, participants in the policy intervention condition believed that most people think both men and women are lower-status, less competent, and less considerate. The policy intervention also affected implicit gender beliefs. Participants in the policy condition displayed more entrenched male-advantaged gender beliefs compared to the baseline condition. We interpret this as evidence that sexual harassment policies may have the unintended effect of activating unequal gender beliefs, which run contrary to the policy's equalizing aims. This research also suggests the value of measuring both explicit and implicit gender beliefs.
Motivation may provoke stereotype use. In a field study of students’ evaluations of university instructors and in a controlled experiment, participants viewed women as less competent than men after receiving negative evaluations from them but not after receiving positive evaluations. As a result, the evaluation of women depended more on the favorability of the feedback they provided than was the case for men. Most likely, this occurred because the motivation of criticized participants to salvage their self-views by disparaging their evaluator led them to use a stereotype that they would otherwise not have used. The stereotype was not used by participants praised by a woman or by participants who observed someone else receive praise or criticism from a woman; all these participants rated the woman just as highly as participants rated a man delivering comparable feedback.
Laws that regulate the employment relation tend to set forth broad and often ambiguous principles that give organizations wide latitude to construct the meaning of compliance in a way that responds to both environmental demands and managerial interests. Organizations respond initially by elaborating their formal structures to create visible symbols of compliance. As organizations construct and institutionalize forms of compliance with laws, they mediate the impact of those laws on society. The author uses data from a nationwide survey of 346 organizations to develop models of the creation and institutionalization of organizationally constructed symbols of compliance following the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Psychological social psychologists have devoted great effort to measuring the elusive construct of unconscious prejudice. However, recent work underscores both the psychometric flaws of these measures and the weaknesses in claims that they predict behavior in realistic organizational settings. Before accepting unconscious prejudice as an inevitable source of individual-level disparate treatment and endorsing structural solutions such as quotas, sociological social psychologists need to explore the relative efficacy of institutional norms and accountability systems widely used for checking both conscious and unconscious forms of individual-level bias.
In this article, we respond at length to recent critiques of research on implicit bias, especially studies using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Tetlock and Mitchell (2009) claim that ''there is no evidence that the IAT reliably predicts class-wide discrimination on tangible outcomes in any setting,'' accuse their colleagues of violating ''the injunction to separate factual from value judgments,'' adhering blindly to a ''statist interventionist'' ideology, and of conducting a witch-hunt against implicit racists, sexists, and others. These and other charges are specious. Far from making ''extraordinary claims'' that ''require extraordinary evidence,'' researchers have identified the existence and consequences of implicit bias through well-established methods based upon principles of cognitive psychology that have been developed in nearly a century's worth of work. We challenge the blanket skepticism and organizational complacency advocated by Tetlock and Mitchell and summarize 10 recent studies that no manager (or managerial researcher) should ignore. These studies reveal that students, nurses, doctors, police officers, employment recruiters, and many others exhibit implicit biases with respect to race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, social status, and other distinctions. Furthermore—and contrary to the emphatic assertions of the critics—participants' implicit associations do predict socially and organizationally significant behaviors, including employment, medical, and voting decisions made by working adults.
The authors discussed the ways in which the distinction between the descriptive and prescriptive components of gender stereotypes may provide a context for thinking about the role of gender stereotyping in sex discrimination and sexual harassment They reviewed the research literature involving the descriptive and prescriptive components of gender stereotypes, with particular emphasis on research published since the American Psychological Association's 1991 amicus brief in
Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989). They suggested that incidents of sex discrimination that involve disparate treatment are more likely to reflect the prescriptive component of gender stereotypes and that incidents of sex discrimination that result in disparate impact are more likely to reflect the descriptive component. The authors discussed the implications of this distinction for sex discrimination and sexual harassment litigation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Prejudice and discrimination against women has become increasingly subtle and covert (N. V. Benokraitis & J. R. Feagin, 1986). Unlike research on racism, little research about prejudice and discrimination against women has explicitly examined beliefs underlying this more modern form of sexism. Support was found for a distinction between old-fashioned and modern beliefs about women similar to results that have been presented for racism (J. B. McConahay, 1986; D. O. Sears, 1988). The former is characterized by endorsement of traditional gender roles, differential treatment of women and men, and stereotypes about lesser female competence. Like modern racism, modern sexism is characterized by the denial of continued discrimination, antagonism toward women's demands, and lack of support for policies designed to help women (for example, in education and work). Research that compares factor structures of old-fashioned and modern sexism and racism and that validates our modern sexism scale is presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The authors present a theory of sexism formulated as ambivalence toward women and validate a corresponding measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). The ASI taps 2 positively correlated components of sexism that nevertheless represent opposite evaluative orientations toward women: sexist antipathy or
Hostile Sexism (HS) and a subjectively positive (for sexist men) orientation toward women,
Benevolent Sexism (BS). HS and BS are hypothesized to encompass 3 sources of male ambivalence: Paternalism, Gender Differentiation, and Heterosexuality. Six ASI studies on 2,250 respondents established convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Overall ASI scores predict ambivalent attitudes toward women, the HS scale correlates with negative attitudes toward and stereotypes about women, and the BS scale (for nonstudent men only) correlates with positive attitudes and stereotypes about women. A copy of the ASI is provided, with scoring instructions, as a tool for further explorations of sexist ambivalence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Using data from 3 different samples, the authors found that: (a) the relationships between political conservatism and racism generally increased as a function of educational sophistication; however, the relationship between political conservatism and anti-Black affect did not increase with educational sophistication. (b) The correlation between political conservatism and racism could be entirely accounted for by their mutual relationship with social dominance orientation. (c) Generally, the net effect of political conservatism, racism, and social dominance orientation on opposition to affirmative action increased with increasing education. These findings contradict much of the case for the principled conservatism hypothesis, which maintains that political values that are largely devoid of racism, especially among highly educated people, are the major source of Whites’ opposition to affirmative action.
Respondents at an Internet site completed over 600,000 tasks between October 1998 and April 2000 measuring attitudes toward and stereotypes of social groups. Their responses demonstrated, on average, implicit preference for White over Black and young over old and stereotypic associations linking male terms with science and career and female terms with liberal arts and family. The main purpose was to provide a demonstration site at which respondents could experience their implicit attitudes and stereotypes toward social groups. Nevertheless, the data collected are rich in information regarding the operation of attitudes and stereotypes, most notably the strength of implicit attitudes, the association and dissociation between implicit and explicit attitudes, and the effects of group membership on attitudes and stereotypes.
In France, a common notion is that the shared interests of graduate students and their professors could lead to intimate sexual relations, and that regulations curtailing those relationships would be both futile and counterproductive. By contrast, many universities and corporations in the United States prohibit sexual relationships across hierarchical lines and sometimes among coworkers, arguing that these liaisons should have no place in the workplace. In this age of globalization, how do cultural and legal nuances translate? And when they differ, how are their subtleties and complexities understood? In comparing how sexual harassment-a concept that first emerged in 1975-has been defined differently in France and the United States, Abigail Saguy explores not only the social problem of sexual harassment but also the broader cultural concerns of cross-national differences and similarities.
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Socially disadvantaged individuals often encounter resistance when they rise to high-status positions. For example, women, according to status characteristics theory, will be disadvantaged relative to men in social interactions, other things being equal. Institutionalizing women as leaders may overcome such disadvantages. Drawing from status characteristics theory and institutional theory, it is predicted that institutionalization of female leadership can reduce the influence gap between women and men by legitimating structures of female leadership. Results of an experiment conducted to test this idea show that, as predicted, male leaders attained higher influence than did female leaders, and leaders appointed on ability attained higher influence than did randomly assigned leaders. Institutionalization, however, reduced the advantage of men such that female leaders appointed on ability when female leadership was institutionalized attained influence as high as male leaders appointed on ability when female leadership was not institutionalized.
Researchers of women workers in gender-skewed work groups repeatedly report evidence of visibility, contrast, and role encapsulation. The purpose of the present study was to explore the potential impact of four causal factors frequently confounded in these studies: proportional underrepresentation (tokenism), gender status, job prestige, and occupational gender-inappropriateness. Study participants' expectations for targets suggested that token numbers alone were not sufficient to produce tokenism; subordinated gender status also contributed regardless of the gender-appropriateness or prestige of the occupation. A theory of tokenism based solely on numbers thus is limited by its failure to acknowledge the impact of organizational and societal gender-based discrimination.
This article presents the results from two expectation-states studies on gender and double standards for task competence. The emergence of such standards under several experimental conditions is investigated. In both studies, men and women, participating in opposite-sex dyads, worked first individually and then as a team in solving a perceptual task. As predicted, result from Experiment 1 show that although subjects of both sexes achieved equal levels of performance, women were held to a stricter standard of competence than men. This difference was more pronounced when the referent of the standard was the partner rather than self. Experimetn 2 investigates the extent to which the double standard is affected by level of accountability for one's assessments. Results show a significant difference by sex of referent of standard when accountability was low, but not when it was increased. In both studies, measures of perceived competence in self and in partner reflected reported standards, as predicted. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
A process by which informal status hierarchies become legitimated is used to explain why those who operate from a disadvantaged
external-status position, such as women or minorities, often have difficulty wielding directive power over other group members,
even if they achieve high rank within the group. The theory predicts that a status structure is more likely to be treated
as legitimate when high standing is based on the consistent advantages of externcd-status characteristics rather than on high
task ability but low externad status. If true, then dominance attempts, as a type of directive behavior, from a high-ranking
member with a consistent status advantage should be more effective in securing compliance from a lower-ranking member than
dominance attempts from an equally high ranking member with high ability but low external status. In an experiment using same-sex
dyads, our hypothesis was supported for male dyads and largely supported for female dyads.
In this paper we argue for the utility of status characteristics theory (Berger et al. 1977) in accounting for research concerned with gender differences in interpersonal task situations. We state and defend a basic status argument that differences in stereotypical gender task behaviors are a direct function of status differences or of attempts to cope with status differences. We show support for this argument in several areas of research: the influence, participation and performer evaluations of group members; their relative performance-reactor profiles; the relation of these behavioral profiles to the assignment of personality traits; the correlation of status position with the gender typing of tasks (i.e., male-identified, female-identified, or neutral); the relationship between gender status and salient information about other statuses; the role of expectations for rewards; and the emergence of mechanisms for coping with the implication of a low gender status position. We conclude that status characteristics theory can provide a set of interrelated explanations of the relationship of gender to interpersonal task behaviors.
In an advanced industrial society like the United States, where an array of processes work against gender inequality, how does this inequality persist? Integrating research from sociology, social cognition and psychology, and organizational behavior, Framed by Gender identifies the general processes through which gender as a principle of inequality rewrites itself into new forms of social and economic organization. The book argues that people confront uncertain circumstances with gender beliefs that are more traditional than those circumstances. They implicitly draw on the too-convenient cultural frame of gender to help organize new ways of doing things, thereby re-inscribing trailing gender stereotypes into the new activities, procedures, and forms of organization. This dynamic does not make equality unattainable, but suggests a constant struggle with uneven results. Demonstrating of how personal interactions translate into larger structures of inequality, the book offers a distinctive analysis of the troubling endurance of gender inequality.
Framed by Gender: How Gender Persists in the Modern World, Oxford, 2011
Advances in measurement have allowed researchers to empirically distinguish between explicit attitudes, which are conscious and controllable, and implicit attitudes, which are activated automatically without cognitive effort or even awareness. Researchers using these methods have shown that although survey data reveal unprecedented declines in Americans’ expressions of overtly racist attitudes, most Americans continue to harbor an implicit pro-White bias relative to other racial minority groups. This research has generated a great deal of controversy. The primary focus of the controversy has been on the findings that have come out of studies using the Implicit Association Test or IAT – a response-time computer software program that records the speed with which positive and negative evaluations of different racial groups come to mind. This paper addresses the following questions that continue to divide researchers: (1) What does the IAT measure? (2) How do implicit attitudes as measured by the IAT relate to people’s race-related judgments and behaviors? (3) What are the political and legal implications of being able to measure implicit racial bias?
This article develops a supply-side mechanism about how cultural beliefs about gender differentially influence the early career-relevant decisions of men and women. Cultural beliefs about gender are argued to bias individuals' perceptions of their competence at var- ious career-relevant tasks, controlling for actual ability. To the extent that individuals then act on gender-differentiated perceptions when making career decisions, cultural beliefs about gender channel men and women in substantially different career directions. The hy- potheses are evaluated by considering how gendered beliefs about mathematics impact individuals' assessments of their own mathe- matical competence, which, in turn, leads to gender differences in decisions to persist on a path toward a career in science, math, or engineering.
This is a study exploring women's integration into large corporate law practices and their mobility within firms.
Are people quick to adopt status beliefs about a social difference that lead them to treat others unequally? In a test of status construction theory, two experiments show that men and women form equally strong status beliefs from only two encounters with others. Men act powerfully on these new beliefs in their next encounters with others but women do not, possibly because women face greater social risks for acting on ambiguous status advantages. Women are just as likely as men, however, to treat someone unequally on the basis of an established status distinction. This suggests that men are first movers in the emergence of status distinctions, but women eventually adopt the distinctions as well. Our results show that people readily transform social differences into status distinctions-distinctions that act as formidable forces of inequality.
Research has shown that a majority of employed women experience sexual harassment and suffer negative repercussions because of it; yet only a minority of these women label their experiences “sexual harassment.” To investigate how people identify sexual harassment, in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 waitpeople in restaurants in Austin, Texas. Most respondents worked in highly sexualized work environments. Respondents labeled sexual advances as sexual harassment only in four specific contexts: (1) when perpetrated by someone who exploited their powerful position for personal sexual gain; (2) when the perpetrator was of a different race/ethnicity than the victim—typically a minority man harassing a white woman; (3) when the perpetrator was of a different sexual orientation than the victim—typically a gay man harassing a straight man; or (4) when violence or the threat of violence was used. The authors argue that the hegemonic norms of acceptable sexual activity privilege heterosexual relationships, legitimize institutionalized forms of sexual exploitation in the workplace, and may protect assailants of the same race and sexual orientation as their victims from charges of sexual harassment.
The legal consciousness of ordinary citizens concerning offensive public speech is a phenomenon whose legal status has been vigorously debated, but which has received little empirical analysis. Drawing on observations in public spaces in three northern California communities and in-depth interviews with 100 subjects recruited from these public locations, I analyze variation across race and gender groups in experiences with offensive public speech and attitudes about how such speech should be dealt with by law. Among these respondents, white women and people of color are far more likely than white men to report being the targets of offensive public speech. However, white women and people of color are not significantly more likely than white men to favor its legal regulation. Respondents generally oppose the legal regulation of offensive public speech, but they employ different discourses to explain why. Subjects' own words suggest four relatively distinct paradigms that emphasize the First Amendment, autonomy, impracticality, and distrust of authority. Members of different racial and gender groups tend to use different discourses. These differences suggest that the legal consciousness of ordinary citizens is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated in relation to particular types of laws, particular social hierarchies, and the experiences of different groups with the law.
Status construction theory argues that interaction between people with unequal structural advantages is crucial in the development and spread of status value beliefs about people's distinguishing attributes. A central claim is that goal-oriented encounters between those who differ in material resources as well as in an easily observed nominal attribute create status beliefs about that attribute which favor the "richer" actors' attribute category. We conduct an experimental test using dyadic, same-sex encounters between participants who differ in pay level and a "mere difference" attribute; the claim is supported for males and females. Status beliefs are distinguished from own-group favoritism by their acceptance by those they disadvantage. A second experiment and other evidence suggest that the interactional hierarchy associated with pay and the distinguishing attribute in such doubly dissimilar encounters pressures low-pay Ss to accept beliefs that disadvantage them. This acceptance is key to the power of interaction to transform structural advantages into status beliefs.
How can we explain the persistence of gender hierarchy over transformations in its socioeconomic base? Part of the answer lies in the mediation of gender inequality by taken-for-granted interactional processes that rewrite inequality into new institutional arrangements. The problems of interacting cause actors to automatically sex-categorize others and, thus, to cue gender stereotypes that have various effects on interactional outcomes, usually by modifying the performance of other, more salient identities. Because changes in the status dimension of gender stereotypes lag behind changes in resource inequalities, interactional status processes can reestablish gender inequalities in new structural forms. Interactional sex categorization also biases the choice of comparison others, causing men and women to judge differently the rewards available to them. Operating in workplace relations, these processes conserve inequality by driving the gender-labeling of jobs, constructing people as gender-interested actors, contributing to employers' discriminatory preferences, and mediating men's and women's perceptions of alternatives and their willingness to settle for given job outcomes.
Most accounts of organizations and law treat law as largely exoge- nous and emphasize organizations' responses to law. This study pro- poses a model of endogeneity among organizations, the professions, and legal institutions. It suggests that organizations and the profes- sions strive to construct rational responses to law, enabled by "ratio- nal myths" or stories about appropriate solutions that are themselves modeled after the public legal order. Courts, in turn, recognize and legitimate organizational structures that mimic the legal form, thus conferring legal and market benefits upon organizational structures that began as gestures of compliance. Thus, market rationality can follow from rationalized myths: the professions promote a particular compliance strategy, organizations adopt this strategy to reduce costs and symbolize compliance, and courts adjust judicial construc- tions of fairness to include these emerging organizational practices. To illustrate this model, a case study of equal employment opportu- nity (EEO) grievance procedures is presented in this article.
The purpose of this article is to document the collective nature of gender performance and sexual pursuit, activities typically associated with individual rather than group behavior. Drawing on narrative accounts, I analyze how young heterosexual male students employ the power of collective rituals of homosociality to perform sexual competence and masculine identity by "girl hunting" in the context of urban nightlife. These rituals are designed to reinforce dominant sexual myths and expectations of masculine behavior, boost confidence in one's performance of masculinity and heterosexual power, and assist in the performance of masculinity in the presence of women. This analysis illustrates how contemporary courtship rituals operate as collective strategies of impression management that men perform not only for women but for other men. In doing so, interaction rituals associated with the girl hunt reproduce structures of inequality within as well as across the socially constructed gender divide between women and men.
Two types of expectations are proposed to guide social interaction: those one holds for herself (first-order expectations) and these one believes others hold for her (second-order expectations). Also, interaction is assumed to be guided by three motives: contributing to group performance, preserving status, and facilitating interaction. These points are developed by formally incorporating ideas regarding reflected self-appraisals, dramaturgical accounts of the interaction order, and expectancy-value theory into status characteristics theory. When first-and second-order expectations conflict and an actor's motives are equally weighted, it is suggested that second-order expectations guide interaction. An initial experiment provides empirical support and insight for discussion.
We examine the effects of organizations' employment practices on sex-based ascription in managerial jobs. Given men's initial preponderance in management, we argue that inertia, sex labels, and power dynamics predispose organizations to use sex-based ascription when staffing managerial jobs, but that personnel practices can invite or curtail ascription. Our results-based on data from a national probability sample of 516 work organizations-show that specific personnel practices affect the sexual division of managerial labor. Net of controls for the composition of the labor supply, open recruitment methods are associated with women holding a greater share of management jobs, while recruitment through informal networks increases men's share. Formalizing personnel practices reduces men's share of management jobs, especially in large establishments, presumably because formalization checks ascription in job assignments, evaluation, and factors that affect attrition. Thus, through their personnel practices, establishments license or limit ascription.
▪ Abstract Flirting, bantering, and other sexual interactions are commonplace in work organizations. Not all of these interactions constitute harassment or assault; consensual sexual relationships, defined as those reflecting positive and autonomous expressions of workers' sexual desire, are also prevalent in the workplace and are the focus of this paper. We begin by reviewing research on the distinction between sexual harassment and sexual consent. Next we examine popular and business literatures on office romance. Finally we discuss sociological research on consensual sexual relationships, including research on mate selection, organizational policy, and workplace culture. We argue that sexual behaviors must be understood in context, as an interplay between organizational control and individual agency.
Most people in the United States believe that sexual harassment should be illegal and that enforcement is necessary. In spite of such widespread support for antiharassment regulations, sexual harassment policy training provokes backlash and has been shown to activate traditional gender stereotypes. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations of sexual harassment policy training sessions, this study uncovers the micro-level mechanisms that underlie ambivalence about the enforcement of sexual harassment law. I find that while the different locations of men and women in the status hierarchy lead to different manifestations of resistance, gender stereotypes are used to buttress perceptions that sexual harassment laws threaten norms of interaction and status positions that men and women have an interest in maintaining. The research has implications for understanding the role of law in social change, legal compliance, and the potential/limits of law for reducing inequality.
Noting that it is important to distinguish threats aimed at shoring up existing norms from those that seek to change customary patterns of behavior, the article discusses a number of conditions influencing the outcome of threats that attempt to produce social change. Among the factors considered are variations in the type of custom, the rationale for change, the social characteristics of the threatened audience, and the extent of law enforcement. The implications of these factors for socializing change are presented.
Using data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States’ federal workplace, this article investigates how legal understanding, opinions about the regulation of sexual harassment, and social status affect whether people define uninvited sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. The results indicate that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms. Moreover, results show that while women generally define sexual harassment more broadly than men, they actually resist defining sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. Finally, knowledge of the workplace sexual harassment policy moderates the effect of beliefs on definitions of sexual harassment. These findings suggest a complexity in the way people reconcile their knowledge of the law with their personal views about power and social interaction in the workplace.
Sociologists of law have long been concerned with the effectiveness of rights; the emergence of diversity training in the 1990s spurred renewed attention to questions of how laws are enacted in daily life. Much scholarship has constructed the managerialization of civil rights law and popularization of diversity concepts as diluting efforts to redress structural discrimination. In studying diversity and antiharassment trainings in practice, I argue that these are sites where civil rights find expression of their obligations, and I find that much of the “dilution” of content stems from diversity trainers’ efforts to negotiate with the resistance of trainees to their new obligations under civil rights law. The trainees evince a variable legal consciousness in relationship to this legality of rights-promotion, to which they are being exposed in these trainings; the findings suggest further research is needed into the legal consciousness of the privileged.
We theorize that sexual harassment in the workplace results from the complex interplay of ambivalent motives and gender stereotyping of women and jobs. Ambivalence combines hostile and “benevolent” sexist motives based on paternalism, gender differentiation, and heterosexuality. Stereotyped images of women and jobs also reflect these three dimensions. Together, these ambivalent motives and stereotyped cognitions promote sexual harassment of different types. Organizational context can encourage or discourage the cognitive-motivational dimensions that underlie sexual harassment.