A few years ago a survey revealed that a shocking 81% of women had experienced some form of sexual harassment at work. This ranged from verbal harassment to sexual assault, and the staggering figure highlights the scale of the problem women face at work.
While one would hope that cases of sexual harassment are treated very much on their merits, research from the University of Washington shows that this is sadly not the case. It finds that women who are young, who act and appear feminine, and who are “conventionally attractive” are far more likely to be believed in any accusations they make about sexual harassment.
All of which, of course, leaves those women who fall outside of these confines facing an uphill battle to prove something that seems to affect women of all types in the workplace.
Unequal support
The research involved over 4,000 participants, and shows that there is a strong perception that the figures showing sexual harassment to be a universal problem do not match up with perceptions that it’s only a problem for “prototypical” women. What’s more, the study suggests that people tend to think that “nonprototypical” women aren’t harmed by harassment, even if they experience it.
“The consequences of that are very severe for women who fall outside of the narrow representation of who a victim is,” the researchers say. “Nonprototypical women are neglected in ways that could contribute to them having discriminatory treatment under the law; people think they’re less credible — and less harmed — when they make a claim, and think their perpetrators deserve less punishment.”
While the #MeToo movement lifted the lid on sexual harassment in the workplace and empowered people to speak up about their personal experiences of it, it remains extremely difficult to achieve recompense for inappropriate behavior, especially as most offenses involve a power gap between perpetrator and victim.
Credible claims
As the #MeToo movement showcased the huge number of high profile women who have been victims of harassment, however, the researchers wanted to explore what factors influence the credibility of claims.
They set up a number of experiments to explore who people think might be sexually harassed, what that harassment might consist of, and how claims of harassment are perceived. These experiments typically consisted of a range of scenarios, with digitally manipulated headshots of those involved.
The researchers began with the basic premise that women are sexually harassed more than men, which is supported by evidence, and explored how our prototype of women factors into our perceptions of harassment.
Previous research has identified our common perception of a prototypical woman as young, attractive, and feminine, and the researchers used this to test the various scenarios, which ranged from flagrant violations of the law to more benign and even vaguely inappropriate behavior.
Prototypical candidate
The participants were asked to draw the kind of woman that they thought would be likely to be harassed for each scenario. It’s an approach the researchers believe uncovers our perceptions and biases at quite a basic level and has previously been used to highlight our biases when we “draw a scientist”, for instance.
The volunteers were also shown a range of digital headshots, all of which were manipulated to look either more masculine or more feminine. They were asked to choose the image that best represented the woman in each of the scenarios they were reading about, and whether the scenario constituted sexual harassment, and indeed what harm the harassment caused and what the repercussions should be.
The results were sadly conclusive in that participants universally thought sexual harassment victims would be prototypical women. Indeed, this link was so strong that women were viewed as more prototypical when they were told she had been sexually harassed. This resulted in the exact same scenarios being viewed as not constituting sexual harassment when they involved non-prototypical women. These women were not only viewed as less credible, but also less harmed by the experience, and subsequently the perpetrator was not regarded as deserving punishment.
Why perceptions matter
The very notion of the prototypical woman matters greatly, therefore, as it suggests that only women displaying certain characteristics are regarded as “women”, and therefore those not displaying those characteristics cannot be vulnerable to sexual harassment.
“When you make a perception of harassment, you also make a connection to womanhood, but the way we understand womanhood is very narrowly defined. So for anyone who falls outside of that definition, it makes it hard to make that connection to harassment,” the researchers say.
Of course, physical appearance is just one variable that goes into describing our prototypical woman, and the researchers believe that other factors, such as race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity may also play a role in determining who we regard as credible victims of sexual harassment. This has perhaps been exacerbated by much of the #MeToo movement focusing on attractive white women.
The findings underline how laws designed to protect us may not always work as intended, as various factors may undermine the perceived credibility of any accusations, and indeed the perceived harm caused by them. By better understanding these distortions, we can only hope that the chances of justice are similarly enhanced.
“If we have biased perceptions of harm for nonprototypical women, it will drastically change their legal outcomes,” the researchers conclude. “If they’re not being believed, they’re effectively being silenced.”
