. Introduction
In the United States, sexual harassment is legally recognized as a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the law that forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and national origin. This legal acknowledgment implies that reducing the incidence of sexual harassment in the workplace will, over time, produce a labor market with less gender inequality (MacKinnon, 1979). There is considerable evidence that the law has played a direct role in organizational change (Dobbin and Kelly, 2007, Edelman et al., 1999, Saguy, 2003 and Schultz, 2003), and that sexual harassment policies and procedures can curtail sexually harassing behaviors (Gruber, 1989 and Perry et al., 1998). However, to date there is little social scientific evidence demonstrating the effect of anti-harassment regulations on the broader goal of reducing workplace gender inequality and a number of socio-legal scholars have argued that such laws can produce effects that reinforce rather than reduce inequality (Bisom-Rapp, 2001, Epstein et al., 1995, Patai, 1998, Schultz, 1998 and Saguy, 2003).
For example, researchers have shown that the widespread implementation of sexual harassment policies and grievance procedures reflect managerial interests over the rights of employees (Edelman et al., 1999 and Marshall, 2005). Schultz (1998) documents evidence from contemporary case law that women who do not conform to the stereotype of the sexually pure and passive victim are less successful in court at convincing judges that sexual conduct was unwelcome – thus making the enforcement of the law a site for the reinforcement of paternalistic stereotypes. In addition, recent studies have shown that sexual harassment policy training can activate gender stereotypes and have a polarizing effect on men and women’s beliefs about gender and gender difference (Marshall and Barclay, 2003, Munkres, 2008, Quinn, 2002, Tinkler, 2012a and Tinkler et al., 2007).
In an experimental study that measured the direct effect of the law on beliefs, Tinkler et al. (2007) found that undergraduate males who were read an excerpt of their university sexual harassment policy expressed stronger male-advantaged implicit beliefs than males who had no exposure to the policy. This finding shows that at the implicit or non-conscious level, the policies activate rather than reduce men’s unequal beliefs. Since systems of inequality are sustained by cultural beliefs about group difference and the enactment of those beliefs in behaviors and institutions (Sewell, 1992), it is important to better understand why sexual harassment law sometimes produces unequal gender beliefs. Moreover, given that sexual harassment is intrinsically linked to power relations and the preservation of heterosexual masculinity ( Burgess and Borgida, 1999, Fiske and Glick, 1995, Mackinnon, 1979, Uggen and Blackstone, 2004 and Yoder, 1994), research needs to examine whether there are gender differences in the effect of sexual harassment policies on gender beliefs.
Building on the experimental design in Tinkler et al. (2007), this study examined the effect of a sexual harassment training video on college students’ tendency to express traditional male-advantaged beliefs about gender difference. I modified the Tinkler et al. (2007) design to include male and female subjects, and a pre-test measure of subjects’ adherence to gender interaction norms. The main hypothesis is that sexual harassment policies activate traditional and unequal gender beliefs among men and women who adhere most strongly to traditional gender interaction norms. I also hypothesize that men and women’s different structural locations in the status hierarchy lead to different, but related reactions to learning about sexual harassment policy. By identifying the roots of resistance to sexual harassment law, this study sets the stage for investigating ways to counter it and make the law more effective.
. Discussion and conclusion
Employing experimental research methods, this study proposed and tested the mechanisms through which sexual harassment policies affect men and women’s gender beliefs. Results show that participants who endorse traditional gender interaction norms react to the sexual harassment policy intervention by implicitly associating men and women with their traditional gender roles. In addition, male gender norms conformists evaluate women as less considerate and less competent after policy exposure while male non-conformists do not. Female subjects who endorsed egalitarian gender interaction norms reacted to the policy training by rejecting paternalistic stereotypes about women and rating women as less considerate. This effect appears to be driven by the negative evaluation of women who make a big deal of sexual harassment, and in so doing, perpetuate stereotypes of women as weak and pure.
