Students ’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: Is It Harassment Only If the Offender Is a Man and the Victim Is a Woman?

The present study investigated 3 potential sources of variability in university students ’ per-ceptions of sexual harassment in hypothetical professor-student scenarios: raters’gender, gender of the professor and student, and rater ’ own sexual harassment. Participants were most likely to identify the interactions as harassment when they involved a male offender and a female victim. They were less likely to label the behaviors as harassment when they occurred between members of the same gender or between a female professor and a male student. Women were more open to viewing the scenarios as harassment and men were unlikely to view the interactions between a female professor and a male student as harass-ment. Personal history of sexual harassment did not influence participants ’ perceptions. Sexual harassment in the workplace and in educational institutions has been the subject of considerable research in the past 10 to 15 years, yet a number of central questions regarding our understanding of how individuals make judg-ments about sexual harassment remain unresolved. Although we know that sex-ual harassment is a common occurrence, prevalence rates among studies have varied considerably. For example, in a review of 18 studies, the number o