March
2009
Psych 20: Sexual Harassment- who are the victims?2
While looking at the Psych Files widget on the moodle page, I saw one about sexual harassment that wasn’t quite what I expected. Like most other people, I’m sure, I thought that most sexual harassment would 
happen in a situation where men have more power and the woman was good looking and the “perfect” feminine. But, that’s not what I found out. A lot of sexual harassment happens to women that don’t fit the perfect feminine role. J.L. Berdahl said, after studying this problem, that the reason the less feminine women get harassed is because the men want to punish these women. Also, this harassment could happen when a man feels threatened by the woman that could be more masculine than him. In the next study done, the results showed that having a majority of men over women in the work place can also result to the women feeling harassed. The last fact stated that putting this all together would mean that women with masculine personalities who worked in a place with more men than women where the most likely to be sexually harassed.
This topic is related to our psych class because J.L. Berdahl had to do different kinds of research to find the facts that I read. Also, sexual harassment is something that could relate to the sociocultural perspective, because maybe the people doing the harassment saw or were harassed by the people in the ring closest to them. I think that harassment of any form is not necessary, but we also have to understand that friends can joke around, but when you don’t know the person that is “joking” around with you, it can cross lines. And people have different boundaries of how much they will tolerate. This is a touchy subject, and every body has their own personal limits.
Here’s a copy of the site that the widget linked me to.
Adam wrote a very good blog that I commented on. Cheack it out here!
Hey Amy,
Good job on this post! I don’t have to go and read the whole article, although I might, but you’ve done a good job of giving me a lot of the support for the research behind the topic. I can see that men would “punish” women who are less than attractive. I might think even women would do this. One question, then, would be whether that response by the men is causal or a correlating response? Also, the idea that having just a few women work with many men makes sense to me, that the women would feel harrassed. If you reversed that situation, had a few men with a lot of women (like it so often is in schools these days), the men wouldn’t likely feel as intimidated by being outnumbered simply because men are less emotional or sensitive than women .. predominately are.
You’re right to say that some people may misinterpret what’s going on around them and others may just be joking and not realize the harm they’re causing, but it’s interesting to see that a common action exists based on certain criteria. That’s the fun in social psychology – it’s so intriguing to figure out exactly why people act the way they do!
Cool beans!
Wow that psych files guy is interesting, I should watch that episode. I think its horrible that less feminine get harrassed as a way of punishment from the men, thats just plain wrong. Glad you shed some light on this topic.