The Perception of Sexual Harassment in Higher Education: Impact of Gender and A ttractiveness

This experimental study used an ambiguous sexual harassment scenario, and manipulated gender and level of physical attractiveness within a perpetrator/ victim dyad. The purpose of this study was to exam ine the perceptions of sexual harassment of male and female students as well as perceptions of perpetrator and victim character traits. Two hundred-ninety six male and 295 female undergraduate and graduate students at a large urban university were asked to read the scenario and describe behavior and character traits for perpetrator and victim using a seven-point semantic differential scale. Eighty-four percent (n 5 495) of the sample were White, 5.3 % (n 5 31) were African American, 5.9 % (n 5 39) were of Hispanic origin, and 4.7% (n 5 28)marked other for race /ethn icity. Results indicate that female students perceived the scenario as more sexually harassing than male students. How-ever, both men and women judged female perpetrators less harshly than male perpetrators. Both men and women were in ¯ uenced by perpetrator attractiveness: they perceived an attractive opposite gender perpetrator as less harassing than a same gender attractive perpetrator. Sexual harassment has been acknowle dged to be a widespread and recurring problem in employment as well as in educational settings. Barak, Fisher, and Houston (1992) found that on the average studie s reported that 60% of women in the workplace and academic settings had been sexually hara-ssed. In an extensive lite rature review, Rubin and Borgers (1990) found that about 70 % of the women reported some form of sexual harassment while attending classe s at a unive rsity, and that the majority of sexual harassment incidents went unreported. Gibbs (1993) surveyed psychologist