In a Day's Work

by Bernice Yeung

“The research was such a riot,” Fitzgerald recalls. “We were in our lab writing items for the SEQ, and we’d name them for the people that did those things. There was the ‘John Brant Memorial Item’ because he would come up behind you and put his arm around you. There was the ‘Andy Jones Memorial Item.’ Every one of those items was written from real-life experience.”12

  The team tested the SEQ on two college campuses to see which questions worked and which did not. They made adjustments and refinements, and today the SEQ has become the go-to questionnaire for measuring sexual harassment. A significant body of research has shown that it works well, though some business-school scholars have criticized it for overestimating sexual harassment because it uses a social science conception of the issue instead of the legal definition. The questionnaire is widely used by researchers all over the world.13

  Fitzgerald says the SEQ was novel then and remains relevant now because it doesn’t treat sexual harassment as a singular event. Instead, sexual harassment is seen as the sum of a range of behaviors over time that constitutes unwanted sexual attention.

  In addition to helping define what sexual harassment is, the SEQ also explores how people respond to it. The questionnaire asks whether the victim of sexual harassment reported the problem and if not, why not? If the person did, what happened?

  From the pilot test of the SEQ, the researchers found strong indications that, contrary to popular belief, most women did not report harassment because they didn’t know where to report it and because they were afraid to make a complaint. “The main thing was fear,” Fitzgerald says. “The fear of not being believed, afraid of being retaliated against and getting in trouble, and feeling embarrassed.”

  Though these findings were in line with the federal government’s survey from 1981, it contradicted a line of academic studies of sexual harassment that found that women said they were likely to report sexual harassment and that they would respond aggressively to put an end to it.14

  These studies had reach, and they fed the faulty assumption that true victims would naturally take swift and strong action in response to sexual harassment. However, this so-called perceptions research had a significant methodological flaw. It was purely theoretical, based on the opinions of college students presented with hypothetical scenarios in a psychology lab.

  Fitzgerald did one study using this approach, but she quickly saw its limitations: “They are very easy to do, because you write a little story on a piece of paper, and you get a bunch of college students to read it, and they say, ‘Well this is what I would do if this happened to me.’ What we have come to find out is, it’s [much more] difficult to sit in a safe classroom and read a story and speculate about what you would realistically do under the circumstances than it is to actually do those things when he comes up behind you and grabs you.”

  The spuriousness of this research was clearly shown in a study where women at a university were asked how they would respond to harassment.15 Next, they underwent an interview that they did not know was related to the study. To measure how the same subjects would actually respond to unwanted sexual attention, the male interviewer purposely asked a series of unseemly personal and sexual questions. In the end, researchers found that few of the participants challenged the inappropriate questions—even the women who had said that they would respond aggressively to sexual harassment in the first part of the study.

  Driven by the responses from the pilot study of the SEQ, Fitzgerald and her colleagues began to prepare additional studies to look more specifically at how women respond to sexual harassment. But first, she got a surprising phone call. A former graduate student’s aunt was working on the legal team of a law professor named Anita Hill, who was preparing to testify about sexual harassment in conjunction with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing. Hill’s legal team learned of Fitzgerald’s work, and they asked if she would help put Hill’s claims in context by presenting what she had learned in the process of creating and testing the SEQ.

  Fitzgerald agreed, although she was never called to testify. The sexual harassment researcher became one of the witnesses, along with Angela Wright and Thomas’s expert witness, who were foreclosed from making public remarks. Nevertheless, the experience offered Fitzgerald a live case study about the vast misconceptions the public had about how people respond to sexual harassment.

  Fitzgerald watched from the hearing room as Hill’s credibility and even her sanity were questioned, and she learned contemporaneously of the death threats that the law professor was receiving. “I was appalled by the whole thing,” Fitzgerald says. “It played out exactly how sexual harassment plays out when a woman makes a claim against a powerful man. Anita’s was a classic case and there was nothing unusual about it at all except that it played out on a national stage.”

  Hill’s treatment at the confirmation hearing underscored the gap between what sexual harassment victims believed was a realistic response and what was expected of them. After the hearings ended, Fitzgerald joined some pro-Anita rallies in Washington, D.C., and then she went back to work.

  In 1995, she and a few colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Social Issues that provided a direct response to those who had misunderstood Anita Hill. It was titled “Why Didn’t She Just Report Him? The Psychological and Legal Implications of Women’s Responses to Sexual Harassment,” and it opened with an examination of the public’s disbelief of Hill’s testimony.16 The researchers reviewed the studies that had been done in the intervening years and found widespread agreement that for most victims, addressing the sexual harassment directly through formal complaints or lawsuits was a “last resort when all other efforts have failed.”

  Victims of sexual harassment were understandably dissuaded from reporting because they knew that, in the rare instances when someone made a formal complaint or filed a lawsuit, they faced consequences like workplace retaliation, losing their job, or social ostracism. In other words, Fitzgerald and her colleagues found, “Despite pervasive public opinion that women should ‘handle’ harassment assertively, confront the perpetrator immediately, and report him to appropriate authorities, reactions to such responses are generally not favorable for those who actually ‘blow the whistle.’”

  This situation has not improved. According to representatives of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, sexual harassment claims have become more extreme and tend to involve claims of retaliation. Anna Park, a regional attorney for the commission, said that she has observed that “as the years passed, the severity of the harassment became worse.”

  “What started out as verbal comments, maybe graffiti in the bathrooms, we started seeing over time more physical aggressive harassment—women being forced to have sex, giving oral sex, raped, subjected to sexual battery,” she says.17 She adds that workers in low-wage industries such as food service, agriculture, and night-shift janitorial work have been particularly susceptible to these types of abuses, and she has handled a number of these kinds of cases for the government.

  But the research that observed that sexual harassment victims tended to not report the problem did not simultaneously find that victims simply did nothing in response to the harassment. “It’s not that women are passive,” Fitzgerald says. “That’s what we were so struck by. They were very much trying to actively manage the situation based on the options they had available to them and what made sense to them. They don’t do nothing. They just don’t do what people on the outside think they should be doing, and they don’t do it for very good reasons.”

  Most victims managed the problem in a range of quotidian and practical ways. Some avoided the perpetrator. Some tried to deflect advances by offering excuses or making jokes. Some coped with the situation by telling themselves that the harassment wasn’t really a problem, or that it was unintentional, or that perhaps it was their fault and they had invited it. But most frequently the women “simply endure, hoping that the situation will eventually go away without the embarrassment and retaliation
that so often accompany a formal complaint,” the researchers wrote.

  By studying the coping strategies of sexual harassment victims, Fitzgerald and her collaborators found that women were making complex calculations about how to respond. And because harassment may be ongoing or may escalate, Fitzgerald and her colleagues described the decision about whether or not to report or complain as being part of an ongoing decision-making process. “Such evaluations are part of a complex, reflexive process that changes over time as the situation unfolds,” the researchers wrote.18

  Since then, many studies involving various populations and professions have found that it is often unreasonable to expect sexual harassment victims to report the problem to management or the government.19 In 2002, Fitzgerald joined Mindy Bergman, Lilia Cortina, and others considered among the foremost researchers on sexual harassment, to conduct an oft-cited large-scale study that looked at how women in the U.S. military respond to sexual harassment.20 It gave yet more credence to what Fitzgerald and others had seen in prior studies.

  The researchers surveyed more than 28,000 members of the military. They found that the approximately 6,000 people who said they had been sexually harassed reported lower job satisfaction and increased psychological distress, but a majority had not reported the harassment to their superiors, and those who did found that it often resulted in some form of retaliation. As the researchers wrote, “Such results suggest that, at least in certain work environments, the most ‘reasonable’ course of action for the victim is to avoid reporting.”

  Even cases of extreme sexual harassment—such as sexual assault or rape by co-workers and supervisors—do not consistently result in high rates of reporting or inspire aggressive responses. A 2013 study of sexual harassment among law enforcement, by End Violence Against Women International and other groups, found that unwanted physical touching by supervisors prompted 8 percent of police officers to file a formal complaint. When their coworkers tried to force them into sex, the officers in the study never made complaints. The researchers also found that although most of the participants in their study had experienced behaviors that could potentially be considered sexual harassment, “very few were reported with a formal complaint, but retaliation was common and often severe.”21 Indeed, retaliation included delays in assistance from their coworkers during emergency situations and tampering with safety equipment.

  Another study from 1991 explored the dynamics around workplace sexual assault among nearly four hundred professional women from the East Coast.22 About 17 percent reported that someone they knew from work had either sexually assaulted them or tried to. People in supervisory positions were behind nearly half of the incidents, which tended to involve more extreme behavior. However, making a formal complaint was found to be complicated by the fact that the supervisors made economic and physical threats against—or job-related promises to—their victims. In general, the study found, “The assailant was a person with legitimate, institutionalized means to alter a woman’s working or learning conditions or the assailant used intrusive physical actions or both.”

  Given these dynamics, the professional East Coast women in the study did not often quit or even complain after being harassed or attacked. About 80 percent of them stayed in their jobs after a workplace assault, and nearly 70 percent continued to report to the same person who had abused them. “Women who quit did not lodge a complaint; women who lodged a complaint did so for the most part in those rare instances in which an outsider was the assailant,” the study says. “Daily workplace interactions no doubt continued unchanged on the surface, while the woman worker adjusted to her situation unaided by interpersonal or institutional support.”

  If reporting is uncommon in general, then for immigrant women in low-wage industries who face additional practical barriers to reporting sexual harassment, it is even rarer. As Fatima Goss Graves of the education and workplace-equity organization National Women’s Law Center put it in 2015 testimony before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “For migrant workers who are harassed, seeking justice can mean risking their livelihoods, putting their families at risk and potentially facing deportation,” she said.

  There appears to be little benefit for anyone—especially an immigrant woman working for meager pay in agricultural, janitorial, or domestic work—to aggressively resist and report sexual harassment. Yet, as the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings established, the courts and the public seem to expect sexual harassment victims to act against their own interests.

  As Fitzgerald and other scholars studied how women respond to and cope with sexual harassment, there were academics looking at the problem from the other side of the equation. They asked different but related questions: Who are the men most likely to sexually abuse women? If there are ways to pinpoint these tendencies, are there ways to intervene?

  This line of research began with Neil Malamuth, who in the late 1960s was an ambitious undergraduate at UCLA with plans to become a high-powered lawyer. Malamuth, now a psychology professor at his alma mater, was diverted from his legal aspirations when he stumbled across an ad for a research-assistant job in the university’s psychology department. He soon found himself working on an experiment exploring the connection between sex and aggression toward women. As the newly minted research assistant, it was his job to pretend to receive electrical shocks from the participants of the study while sitting in another room. Malamuth found the job terribly boring, but it ushered him onto a new academic path.

  Malamuth began conducting psychological research on risk taking and conflict resolution, though he couldn’t help but stay attuned to the discussions on feminism and women’s rights that were raging around him on campus. He found the debates around the eroticization of violence against women in ads and pop culture particularly compelling. From shoe designers to rock bands, it had become common for female corpses or women’s bruised bodies to be used to market products and brands. “Some people were saying that this is fantasy and everyone knows that this is a chic way of getting attention and it doesn’t affect people’s real attitudes or behaviors,” Malamuth says of the debate that was happening at the time. “Other people were saying, ‘No. This is both a reflection of the problem and a cause.’”

  Malamuth wanted to get to the bottom of things, so he came up with an experiment. He would randomly assign male participants into two groups. One would read a sexually violent story from a porn magazine, and another group would read the same story with all of the violent passages removed. Then he would use a survey to gauge whether the material made them feel more aggressive toward women.

  The researcher was days away from starting the experiment when he found himself on campus talking to some friends. A woman walked by and she caught the attention of one of the men in the group. After she had moved on, one of the men said, “If I could get away with it, I’d jump her.” No one in the group blinked at the comment. Instead, they all stood there, nodding their heads. Malamuth was struck by the whole scene, and before running his experiment, he added a final question to the survey: “If you knew you were assured that you would not be caught or punished, would you force a woman to have sex with you?”

  Malamuth’s study, published in 1980, didn’t find much evidence that a single exposure to sexually violent content from a porn magazine had much influence on men’s sexual aggression toward women one way or the other.23 However, the question that he had thrown in at the last minute drew an astonishing response. One third of the participants said that they would probably force a woman into sex acts if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.

  Malamuth decided to look more closely at that group of men, a segment of the respondents that he described as having a “high likelihood to rape” compared to the others. Among the other questions he had asked in his survey, Malamuth looked for trends and commonalities among those who said that they would rape a woman if they knew they could get away with it.

  He found that the men who had a proclivity to rape tended
to have more callous attitudes toward sexual assault in general, and they were more likely to believe in myths about rape, including the notion that women secretly enjoy it. He also found that this group of men were more likely to be sexually aroused by depictions of rape.

  Through additional research, he pinpointed two general frameworks to describe the characteristics of men who admitted to committing acts of violent aggression against women but who had never been convicted. First, this group tended to have individual experiences that led them to decontextualize sex from a relationship. Second, they had been socialized into and accepted ideas of male dominance.24

  To further test these ideas, Malamuth conducted a study to compare convicted rapists in prison to the men who said they would rape if they knew they wouldn’t get caught. After giving the study participants a diagnostic test, Malamuth compared the results to the preexisting academic literature on the characteristics of rapists. He found that on almost every condition, men who said they would force a woman to have sex if they could get away with it were similar to those who had been convicted of the crime. Specifically, both of these groups tended to be more accepting of violence against women and to view sex outside the context of a relationship. The only finding that surprised Malamuth was that convicted rapists were not necessarily more hostile toward women than the likely-to-rape men.25

  The strength of the likely-to-rape framework has since been borne out in numerous studies by other scholars, and in particular a 1995 study that Malamuth conducted gave it additional reliability.26 With National Institute of Mental Health funding, Malamuth and his colleagues reconnected with a group of Canadian men who had taken his survey on sexual aggression toward women decades before as college students. He followed up to see how they had fared.

  Malamuth located these former students, who were now in their early thirties, to gauge whether they had, in fact, acted in sexually aggressive ways. Based on reports from both the ex-students and their romantic partners at the time, the study found that those who had scored high in sexual aggression in their youth were more likely to engage in verbal abuse and aggressive behavior toward their partners as adults.