Increasing Public Awareness of Sexual Harassment

Gender-based Attitudes Toward Sexual Harassment

The existing literature essentially consists of research examining for differences in male and female views and perceptions of sexual harassment and related matters. One area of study associated with male and female differences is in their perceptions of sexual harassment complaints. Summers (1991), for example, examined for gender-based differences in a relation to judgements of written descriptions of sexual harassment complaints.

Subjects in the study were 80 male and 80 female business majors. Each of the written descriptions depicted an incident in which a female employee accused a male employee of sexual harassment. Summers focused on subjects' perceptions of why these females had filed the complaint. In other words, Summers was interested in whether subjects believed that the complaint was made because of actual sexual harassment or for some other non-sexual reason.

Findings indicated that both males and females were inclined to believe that other factors were responsible for the complain being issued. These alternative reasons included

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whether the female was a professor or a student, regardless of the level of the harassment taking place, or of the victim's response to the harassment. Johnson et. al. (1991) concluded that men were more likely than females to misperceive women's interpersonal behavior with the opposite sex as having a sex-based component. Despite findings of gender-based differences, it is important to note that women themselves are not uniform in their views and perceptions of sexual harassment. For example, Bremer, Moore and Bildersee (1991) surveyed perceptions of sexual harassment behavior as well as knowledge of reporting procedures in samples of 521 college students, 46 faculty members, 20 college administrators, and 20 support staff personnel. It was observed that female students were less likely to label behaviors sexual harassment than were working women. Gender-based perceptions of both sexual harassment and acquiescence to sexual demands were examined by Hartnett, Robinson and Singh (1989). In their study, 60 male and 95 female college students were asked to read descriptions of sexual harassment incidents. In some of the descriptions, the response of the harassee was not stated. In other descriptions, the harassee gave into the
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Approximate Word count = 1455
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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