Real Versus Imagined Gender Harassment

Julie A. Woodzicka [*]

Sexual harassment studies that use hypothetical situations and retrospective reviews may overestimate the degree to which victims actually stand in front of their harassers. The result is that immediate emotional reactions are little understood and victims are ofttimes taken to task for nonconfrontational behavior. To address this pass over we describe our experimental investigation of immediate reactions to sexually harassing questions collisioned during a realistic job interview. Behavioral and emotional answers are compared to those in an imagined harassing interview. flows indicate that interviewees who are actually harassed react real differently than those who alone imagine their responses. For example, imagined victims anticipate feeling angry on the other hand actual targets report being afraid. Anticipated behavior also did not interstice with actual behavior. Implications of these discrepancies for perceptions of "correct" ways to answer to harassment are examined.

Sexual harassment victims are ofttimes blamed for their predicament (Cohen & Cohen, 1993) individual reason for blame derives from the perception that the target failed to rejoin adequately to the alleged harassment (Fitzgerald, Swan, & Fischer, 1995) Consider reactions to the widely publicized case of Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas. In 1991 Hill, a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma, claimed to have been sexually harassed by dint of Thomas, then a Supreme Court nominee. A oft-repeated response was to question Hill's credibility because she had not filed a formal complaint against Thomas at the time of the alleged incidents. In fact, many women asserted that they certainly would have reported the harasser had they received similar treatment. Research with hypothetical harassment scenarios also finds that women believe that they would report or face harassers (Baker, Terpstra, & Larntz, 1990; Terpstra & Baker, 1989) In actual cases, however, evidence remind ofs that women tend neither to report nor directly be opposite to incidences of harassment (Fitzgerald et al., 1995; Gruber & Bjorn, 1982; Gutek 1985; Loy & Stewart, 1984)

Recognizing discrepancies between actual and anticipated replys to harassment may, however, be closely linked to understanding that harassment constitutes a situation and not barely an act. When sexual harassment is regarded alone as unwanted actions, then the onus shifts to the victim to rejoin appropriately. The "reasonable woman" standard was the legal attempt to determine by what mode a representative woman would react to sexual harassment (Ellison v Brady, 1991) Juries likely have their possess implicit standards for deciding whether a plaintiff's rejoinders sufficiently conveyed that the sexual advances that were made were unwelcome. If juries and jurists believe that greatest in quantity women confront harassment, they may penalize women who do not, believing that this inaction demonstrates that no harm was done. individual premise of the present research is that insufficient attention to the immediate harassing situation has accompanyed to result in blaming the target rather than understanding what the issues are.

This form of victim blaming is in addition to placing the load of remedying the harassing situation upon the victim. For example, Waxman (1994) wrote in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal that the harassee must "learn: (a) to stand in front of the harasser, (b) to share her/his feelings about the harassment, and (c) to count the harasser, in very explicit terminuss that she/he wants the harassing behavior to stop" (p 244) In short, there may be unrealistic standards and expectations for by what mode one should respond to harassment.

To address this issue, this article contrasts distal (imagined and retrospective) replys with proximal and actual replys to harassment. In the first section, we critically review the manners most frequently used to close attention responses to sexual harassment. nearest we describe the value of studying immediate emotional and nonverbal reactions to sexual harassment. These reactions have repeatedly been neglected, in part, because usual manners of data gathering have been hard squeezeed to objectively describe victims' answers In the third section, we describe our efforts at assessing these more wily and instant reactions. Specifically, we raiseed a realistic job interview in which sexually harassing questions were asked by the agency of a male interviewer and compared the resulting reactions to a nonharassing interview. The aim is to understand more about what really happens when someone is harassed than about what should happen.

At a more general horizontal we are interested in understanding for what cause [i]or[/i] reason there is a gap between women's imagined replications to discrimination and their actual answers Social psychologists have a long-standing interest in examining on what account there is a disparity between in what way people think they will act in a particular situation and what they actually do. This is especially relevant in the case of sexual harassment, because beliefs about by what mode one would act likely form the backdrop for evaluating others' actions in the same situation. If single anticipates that one would face or report a sexual harasser, then he or she is likely to be more critical of a one who fails to do likewise in the face of harassment. In addition, beliefs about by what mode one would respond might lead to feelings of shame or guilt were individual to look the other way when it actually happens.