lawyers, legislators, and judges as they grapple with
sexual harassment in a multicultural workforce popu-
lated with large numbers of members of both sexes.Psychological Research
on Sexual Harassment
Despite a plethora of empirical research efforts, few the-
ories explain the production of sexually harassing con-
duct or the evaluation of sexual harassment allegations
at work. With regard to the production of sexually
harassing conduct, Barabara Gutek proposed and suc-
cessfully tested sex-role spillover theory as one of the
earliest models of workplace misconduct resulting from
gender-based interactions. Data collected in a telephone
survey of Los Angeles workers supported a tendency for
male workers to invoke sex-based stereotypes, which
sometimes produced inappropriate sexual conduct,
especially in male-dominated occupations and work
groups. In male-dominated settings, gender became
highly salient and activated social stereotypes that were
inappropriate guides for workplace conduct. Later tests
of the theory have not been as successful. Other
researchers presented vignettes of ambiguous incidents
and found that participants rated the behaviors more
harassing when they occurred in integratedornontradi-
tional occupations. Sex-role spillover theory has suc-
cessfully explained how workers label only some forms
of harassment and only with certain stereotypes of
women workers. Thus, the literature supports a role for
gender distributions (i.e., the ratio of men to women in
the workplace) in explaining harassment, but the exact
form of that relationship is not at all clear.
Focusing on the situational side of the workplace,
Louise Fitzgerald and colleagues theorized that sexual
harassment is a function of both gender distribution
and the extent to which the organization communicates
tolerance of harassment. In one study examining
women in a large West Coast utility company, these
researchers report that workers who perceived the
organizational climate to be tolerant of harassment and
who participated in nontraditional gender occupations
reported higher levels of harassment, job dissatisfac-
tion, and psychological distress. Data from another
organizational survey suggested that women who self-
report harassment and those who experience behavior
that others find harassing suffer from similar psycho-
logical harms.
Relying on traditional social psychological the-
ory, John Pryor and his group posited that sexual
harassment is the joint product of situation andpersonvariables. In one study, they found that men who
scored high on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass
Scale (LSH) overestimated the co-occurrence of words
power and sexon a paired-associates memory test.
Other studies using subliminal primes found evidence
for an automatic power and sex link in high LSH men.
In still other research, men high in LSH and men
primed with sexist ads, such as those seen on televi-
sion, asked sexist questions of a female confederate
during an ostensible job interview. Together, these
studies showed how stimuli commonly encountered by
workers can trigger uncontrollable cognitive responses
in some men that produce harassing behavior.Gender Differences
One area in which a great deal of psychological research
exists concerns judgment differences between men and
women in cases of alleged harassment. With few excep-
tions, experiments, field studies, and surveys show con-
sistent gender differences in judgments of harassment
against women, with women using broader definitions
and being more likely to label specific incidents as harass-
ing. To explain the extant gender effects, one group of
researchers presented scenarios to evaluators and pro-
duced a path analysis in which hostile sexism, observer
self-referencing, and complainant credibility explained
gender effects in harassment judgments. However, others
found gender effects on harassment tolerance and on
harassment judgments even after they controlled for hos-
tile sexism.
Despite these findings, some authors have questioned
the size and consistency of gender effects, and one meta-
analysis of 83 investigations found significant but small
effects for gender. Richard Wiener and colleagues sug-
gested that the severity of the unwelcome conduct might
explain the seemingly small effects. Researchers using
experimental (scenario) methods with undergraduate
participants reported that women rated ambiguous con-
duct more harassing, but perceived severe and benign
instances similarly to men, while others surveying work-
ers found gender effects with ambiguous, but not with
severe or innocuous cases. A subsequent meta-analysis
completed in 2001 took type and severity of harassment
into account and found a moderately large overall gender
effect (i.e., women found a broader range of behaviors
harassing) and even stronger gender effects in studies
using moderately severe hostile work environments.
Furthermore, when Wiener and colleagues presented
evaluators scenarios based on Ellison v. Brady and
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