Explaining sexual harassment judgments: Looking beyond gender of the rater.

Abstract

In two decades of research on sexual harassment, one finding that appears repeatedly is that gender of the rater influences judgments about sexual harassment such that women are more likely than men to label behavior as sexual harassment. Yet, sexual harassment judgments are complex, particularly in situations that culminate in legal proceedings. And, this one variable, gender, may have been overemphasized to the exclusion of other situational and rater characteristic variables. Moreover, why do gender differences appear? As work by Wiener and his colleagues have done

Age Comparisons in Workplace Sexual Harassment Perceptions

“…Tests for the "severe and pervasive" prong are both objective (would a similarly situated reasonable person find the conduct to be severe or pervasive) and subjective (did the plaintiff find that the conduct constituted a hostile work environment; Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc. 1993;Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Serv., Inc. 1998). Thus, legally relevant perceptions of harassment involve a consideration of (a) whether the conduct constituted hostile work environment; (b) unwelcomeness by the target(s); (c) severity of the conduct; and (d) pervasiveness of the conduct (Beiner 2005;O'Connor et al 2004;Wiener and Hurt 2000;Wiener et al 1997).…”

The effects of harassment severity and organizational behavior on damage awards in a hostile work environment sexual harassment case

“…Why might jurors use their perceptions of the plaintiff's pain and suffering rather than the plaintiff's actual reported harm in allocating compensatory damages? Previous research has found that self-referencing, or how a juror would act or react in a similar situation, is an important mediator in sexual harassment liability decisions (e.g., O'Connor et al, 2004). It is possible that this mediating variable may generalize to jurors' decisions about pain and suffering damage awards in sexual harassment cases as well.…”

“…In addition to determining liability, jurors face the difficult task of determining whether sexual harassment plaintiffs should recover damages for economic losses and pain and suffering, and whether employers should be assessed penalties for especially reckless behavior (Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (Wiener, Hurt, Russell, Mannen, & Gasper, 1997;Wiener, Watts, Goldkamp, & Gasper, 1995) and how jurors make liability decisions in sexual harassment cases (Gutek et al, 1999;Kovera, McAuliff, & Hebert, 1999;Levett & Kovera, 2009;O'Connor, Gutek, Stockdale, Geer, & Melancon, 2004), but little attention has been devoted to damage award decisions jurors make after they find a defendant liable (Kovera & Cass, 2002).…”

Examining Moderators of the Hindsight Bias in the Context of Civil Legal Decision-Making: Counterfactuals, Causal Proximity, and Self-Referencing

“…Also, if the person had actually experienced the same situation, they could ask, "How did I feel or react when that happened to me?" Some research has considered selfreferencing to be a form of empathy (e.g., O'Connor et al, 2004). Further, selfreferencing can be cognitive (imagining how oneself would perceive or think) or affective (imagining how oneself would feel).…”

“…Additionally, there is a possibility that jurors will spontaneously self-reference to one of the parties in a lawsuit. O'Connor et al (2004) and Wiener and Hurt (2000) have examined the effects of jurors' self-referencing in the context of sexual harassment cases and have found a large relationship between measures of self-referencing and verdicts, such that jurors who self-referenced to the plaintiff's situation were more likely to find the defendant liable for sexual harassment.…”