‘Conventionally attractive’ women likely to be believed when they make harassment claims

Anew study has revealed that women who are young, ‘conventionally attractive’ and appear to act feminine are more likely to be believed when making accusations of sexual harassment.

The findings of this University of Washington-led study involved more than 4,000 participants, reveals perceptions that primarily “prototypical” women are likely to be harassed. The research also showed that women outside of those socially determined norms or “non-prototypical” women are more likely perceived as not being harmed by harassment.

That leaves women who don't fit the prototype potentially facing greater hurdles when trying to convince a workplace or court that they have been harassed.

“The consequences of that are very severe for women who fall outside of the narrow representation of who a victim is,” said Bryn BandtLaw, a graduate student in psychology at the UW and one of the study’s lead authors.

“Nonprototypical women are neglected in ways that could contribute to them having discriminatory treatment under the law; people think they’re less credible – and less harmed – when they make a claim and think their perpetrators deserve less punishment.” The study, published Jan. 14 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is co-led by Jin Goh, a former postdoctoral researcher at the UW now at Colby College, and Nathan Cheek of Princeton University.

The researchers said the idea for the study came from the #MeToo movement, founded by Tarana Burke and popularized in 2017 after a number of actresses accused movie producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and abuse. #MeToo and related movements empowered individuals to come forward about their experiences with sexual harassment, which the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission defines as gender discrimination and/or unwelcome sexual behaviour that can affect a person's job performance and work environment.

The movement also encourages people to name perpetrators and in some cases pursue legal action.

But as the study's authors reflected on the celebrities who stepped forward, they wanted to explore further the notion of credibility. They set up a series of experiments to be divided among the 4,000 participants to address three research questions: who we think is sexually harassed; what constitutes harassment; and how claims of harassment are perceived. The experiments largely consisted of written scenarios and digitally manipulated headshots.

The team started with the research-supported premise that more women are sexually harassed than men. They employed a psychological framing of group membership, whereby a behaviour – in this case, sexual harassment – is linked to a specific group, in this case, women.

Each group has prototypes for who is considered part of it: Past research has identified characteristics perpetuated in pop culture and society of the prototypical woman: young, feminine, conventionally attractive, and even weak and incompetent.

The overall results were clear: Participants generally perceived sexual harassment victims to be prototypical women. In fact, the association between sexual harassment and prototypical women is so strong that the exact same woman was seen as more prototypical when people were told she was sexually harassed.

In consequence, the exact same scenarios, presented with non-prototypical women, were less likely to be considered harassment, and non-prototypical victims are seen as less credible, less harmed by the harassment, and their harasser is seen as less deserving of punishment.