Those uppity women: An interview with Jennifer Berdahl

It started with that 1994 film, “Disclosure.” The flick, which stars Demi Moore as Meredith Johnson and Michael Douglas as Tom Sanders, contorted our conceptions of sexual harassment. Suddenly, a woman was the sexual aggressor and a man her target, although that’s not the card Johnson played when a political shoving match, a diversionary smoke screen to cover fraud, followed her harassment. While Johnson privately exerted sexual power and control over Sanders, she raised the sexual harassment flag and pointed a victim’s finger at the actual victim: Him.

“The media was talking about men are sexually harassed, too,” said Jennifer Berdahl, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management. Berdahl published “The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women” in the March, 2007 edition of the Journal of Applied Psychology.

That notion, that sexual harassment wasn’t confined only to women, led Berdahl to research and write a paper about the sexual harassment of men. And what she found translated to a morphing pattern in the sexual harassment of women, too.

“Sexual harassment is really a penal system for violating norms in the workplace,” Berdahl said.

Berdahl offers the following example to illustrate her point: Say a man takes family leave to care for a newborn, a role traditionally assigned to a woman. If the workplace gender roles are rigid and dogmatic, his traditionally minded colleagues may haze him with taunts to his masculinity. He’ll be teased and humiliated because he’s not upholding traditional social norms in a way condoned by the group.

Sexual harassment is a “social system for status quo enforcement,” Berdahl said.

In the course of that research, Berdahl discovered that it’s not just men who are punished with sexual harassment for defying social norms in the workplace. Enter career-minded women – ones who have checked docile and submissive attitudes with their grandmother’s corsets and demure social graces.

“Some research showed that women who violated gender roles were subjected to sexual harassment,” Berdahl said.

But why? Traditionally, the sexual harassment of women in the workplace has been about sexual attraction and a man’s overblown chase. If a woman fit the social norms of attractiveness – based on a traditional masculine-is-aggressive-and-feminine-is-submissive ideal – than it would stand to reason that soft and docile women would be harassed the most. Not so, Berdahl found.

“(Sexual harassment) was a means of keeping them (women) in their place,” Berdahl said.

In short: If a woman takes on attributes typical of a man, i.e.  assertiveness or confidence or excels at a job without apology, then she may become a harassment target. Berdahl offers the famous example of the Price Waterhouse case. An excerpt from her article: 

Another (example) includes the famous case of Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989), in which an outspoken and extremely high-performing woman in a male-dominated professional accounting office was denied partnership and instructed to learn how to “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry” (p. 235). This case led some to propose that this kind of sex discrimination is motivated by a desire to punish women who do not conform to prescriptive sex stereotypes or to beliefs about how women should behave (Burgess & Borgida, 1999; Fiske & Stevens, 1993).

“Within the confines of being a woman, they (the harassed) diverged,” Berdahl said. “People are going to be motivated to punish those women. At some level, there’s some violation of a social code going on.”

When asked how to address sexual harassment, Berdahl starts by stressing that the onus does not belong on the victim. The harassers, not the victim, are to blame. And it’s the harassers’ behavior, not the victim’s, that’s at fault. “This if often a mobbing type behavior,” Berdahl said. “Blaming the victim is the easiest way to resolve this sort of painful event in one’s mind. ‘Well, she deserved it.’ ‘Walk away.’ But the organizational structure that allowed and encouraged the behavior needs to be changed.”

What to do: “One of the most difficult, but effective ways, is to talk to the harasser, especially if the behavior is not conscious,” Berdahl said. “Basically, put on record that you don’t like the behavior and that you want it to stop.”

Ignoring harassing behavior or trying to appease a harasser and accomplices (most often they act in packs, Berdahl said), doesn’t work. Among the harassers and their bystanding peers, the victim will be perceived as weak, which will be a catalyst for more harassment.

“Sometimes fighting back is the best method,” Berdahl said, noting that a formal complaint is an unusual step in most cases.

Harassment erodes workplace social structures, can ruin health and cause the victim to retreat, she said.

“It is crazymaking,” Berdahl said. “People get to the point of suicide. … It becomes a downward spiral.”

And it’s not going away. Overt sexual harassment may have gone the way of bell bottom jeans and sad-faced clowns, but the undercurrents are still there.

“You see a lot more indirect acts now of shunning and exclusion,” Berdahl said. “In general, it’s been rechanneled into incivility. It may not, on the surface, appear to be sex-based. But it is.”

How far have we come, as a society, in addressing and combating sexual harassment? “I think we’ve come really far in terms of people’s understanding as far as charges and motives. I think that the public and the social awareness is way past what it used to be. But we haven’t moved past sex stereotypes.”