There are two ways to understand sexual harassment in the workplace, but one of them is more scientific than the other.
On one view, sexual harassment – as the name implies – is all about sexuality. According to the evolutionary psychology research program, men and women have evolved different psychological mechanisms to solve the different challenges they faced to successfully reproduce back in the Pleistocene epoch.
For men, these adaptive mechanisms include a greater interest in casual sex, and a tendency to mistakenly conclude that women are sexually interested in them. Women, in contrast, evolved to be more sensitive to potential threats to their sexual autonomy – and therefore perceive men’s advances as harassing.
But for social science scholars informed by the gender hierarchy – the idea that men hold more power and status than women – sexual harassment is “an expression of workplace sexism, not sexuality or sexual desire”. It is a mechanism for preserving work roles as masculine terrain, and pushing back against threats to men’s higher status within a workplace.
It might be tempting to think one scientific view is preferred over another for political reasons: he likes the evolutionary psychology account because he is a misogynist; or she likes the gender hierarchy account because she is blinded by her feminist ideology.
These accusations don’t get us very far. Fortunately, the philosophy of science gives us three well-established criteria for what makes for a good scientific explanation.
In our recently published research, we used these three criteria for a good scientific explanation to compare the evolutionary psychology and gender hierarchy maintenance accounts of workplace sexual harassment. So what did we find?
First, we found that the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation was clearly superior when it came to identifying causes that make sense of a broad range of workplace sexual harassment phenomena.
Evolutionary psychology makes sense of sexual coercion and some forms of unwanted sexual attention, to be sure. But research shows these kinds of behaviours almost invariably go hand-in-hand with sexist jokes, crude sexual remarks and sexually degrading imagery, such as porn.
None of these behaviours are plausibly about trying to gain sexual favours, even though some are sexual in nature. These behaviours are called “gender harassment” –which is the most common form of sexual harassment.
Unlike evolutionary psychology, gender hierarchy maintenance can explain all three forms of harassment. Demands for sexual favours, sexist remarks and requests for note-taking can all be understood as behaviours that reinforce traditional gender roles and confer greater status and authority to men.
Our research points to the value of understanding workplace sexual harassment through the lens of gender hierarchy maintenance. This offers hope for the future of workplace culture: it suggests men are not essentially predisposed to be sexual harassers, with little that can be done to alter their evolved natures.
Instead, sexual harassment is best understood as a consequence of our current social and cultural environment. And this is something we can shape to facilitate a better and safer future at work.