Clinical Aspects of Sexual Harassment and Gender Discrimination

Psychological Consequences and Treatment Interventions

Sharyn Ann Lenhart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135941307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Gender & The Law
• Index: Law

This book addresses the psychological impact of sexual harassment and gender discrimination from both a clinical and theoretical perspective, whereas previous literature on the topic has emphasized legal and employment consequences. To start, Lenhart provides a comprehensive summary and integration of existing literature and discusses relevant aspects of the workplace and legal environments. The second portion of the book deals with the psychodynamics of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, placing these violations in proper psychological perspective, along the same lines as rape, battering and other forms of gender-based abuse. The wide spectrum of psychological consequences of discrimination will be discussed and an effective and integrative model for intervention and treatment will be presented.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction and Overview

A Clinical Perspective of Sexual Harassment and Gender
Discrimination
Political and Historical Perspectives
Definitions
Scope and Purpose
Structure and Content

A CLINICAL PERSPECTIVE OF SEXUAL HARASSMENT AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION

A clinically oriented book focusing on the diagnostic understanding and treatment of the mental and physical health consequences of sexual harassment and other significant forms of gender discrimination in work and educational settings is both ahead of schedule and woefully late. It is ahead in the sense that the psychiatric symptomatology, the psychological sequelae, and the treatment interventions that will be described are aimed at a serious mental health problem, one that has been both incompletely defined and underrecognized as a health problem. As a result, the solid body of empirical research that should be available as a framework for discussion is relatively new, relatively scarce, and limited almost entirely to sexual harassment, which constitutes only one of the many forms of psychologically damaging gender-based discrimination. It is woefully late in the sense that little has been written about treatment interventions for gender discrimination, even though women have been entering the workplace in large numbers that have been documented since the 1970s; exposing themselves to various forms of gender discrimination, whose prevalence has been well documented since the 1980s; and experiencing negative psychological consequences that have been well documented since the early 1990s.

POLITICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

The origins of this dilemma lie in the political history of these issues. Sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based employment and academic discrimination are not new phenomena. Historical accounts of discriminatory behaviors toward working women date back to colonial times. Foner (1947) cites a notice published in the New York Weekly Journal in 1734 by a group of female domestic servants protesting their employment conditions. Bularzik (1978) and Fitzgerald (1993) cite many examples from the Industrial Revolution. A popular account of what now would be termed sexual harassment even appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1908 (Bratton, 1987).

Despite such long-standing evidence of discriminatory behaviors, these phenomena remained unidentified elements of the work and academic environments that were deeply embedded into the culture but at the same time obscured from view (Wood, 1992). Both Miller (1976) and Wood (1992) have observed that those in power have the prerogative to define the world from their own perspective and thus both consciously and unconsciously exclude the experience of their subordinates. Because those in power seldom suffer the adverse effects of gender-based discrimination, it is not surprising that these phenomena remained unnamed and unexamined aspects of the work and academic environments. It required the political force of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to provide a meaningful definition of gender discrimination. At that time sex discrimination was defined as an illegal act, along with discrimination related to race, color, religion, and national origin, as stated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ironically, but perhaps prophetically, sex discrimination was not included initially because it was not considered a serious problem. Instead, a southern congressman opposing the bill included sex discrimination in it, hoping that the “ludicrousness” of such an addition would help defeat the bill (Roth, 1993).

In a similar manner, sexual harassment as a specific form of gender discrimination was defined during the 1970s Women’s Movement, which focused attention on various forms of sexual violence against women. Once these phenomena were identified as political inequities requiring legal redress, a group of seminal legal and social science scholars began academic exploration of them, developing a theoretical framework within which current scholars continue to work. Widespread public knowledge of these issues remained obscure, however, until the highly publicized Clarence Thomas Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings, during which Anita Hill provided national televised testimony that included graphic descriptions of sexual harassment. Shortly thereafter, a proliferation of complex specialized prevalence studies focusing primarily on sexual harassment emerged from a broad spectrum of employment and academic settings (e.g., law, medicine, business, nursing, library science, and law enforcement), as well as from a broad spectrum of people who were victimized (e.g., university faculty and students, government employees, union workers, middle and high school students, health-care professionals, and lawyers). Although the studies varied greatly with regard to both methodology and behaviors studied, outcomes consistently documented that sexual harassment as a particular form of sex discrimination is prevalent, underreported, and associated with adverse outcomes to both individuals and institutions (Stockdale, 1996). Unfortunately, similar studies focusing on other forms of sex discrimination or on the interaction of sexual harassment and other forms of gender discrimination are currently in scarce supply.

Legal activity proliferated in parallel to social science and management research. An impressive body of case law further documented: (1) the nature of discriminatory actions, and (2) the extent of liability and damages (see Chapter 3 for legal history). Studies in the last decade have become more sophisticated with regard to delineating characteristics of harasser-victim interactions and documenting negative psychological sequelae, but again primarily with regard to sexual harassment. Nonetheless, the public in general, as well as most clinicians, still regard sex discrimination as a legal, rather than a health, issue. Physicians and mental health professionals often neglect to take work histories on women patients or clients. Large-scale well-designed studies focused on sexual harassment and other forms of gender discrimination are lacking. Specific studies on physical and mental health consequences are even more rare but are emerging. Research has typically been unfunded and pragmatically opportunistic, focusing on specific issues that were easily isolated. The dilemma presented by the lack of response by large funding organizations is well illustrated by the following vignette.

CASE VIGNETTE 1–1

Funding Organization’s Bias Regarding Sex Discrimination Research

A faculty member at a prestigious university was approached with a proposal by a research team working for a national funding organization. She had just published a small sexual harassment study dealing with a specialized group of employees. The research team had inadvertently discovered similar results embedded in a largescale study of employee attitudes and experiences in the workplace. The team encouraged the faculty member to submit a grant proposal to its organization for a large-scale sexual harassment study focusing on prevalence, health, and attitudinal outcomes. In collaboration with the research team, she submitted the proposal 3 months later but received no formal response from the research funding organization. Eight months later, she telephoned a member of the research team to inquire about the proposal. The researcher explained with embarrassment that the board had dismissed the proposal as insignificant, against the recommendations of its own research team and without the customary review process. He commented, “Our board just didn’t want to see this as a legitimate issue worthy of research.”

DEFINITIONS

For people to understand the mental health consequences of sexual harassment and gender discrimination, appropriate definitions must be provided.

Individuals victimized by gender discrimination need terminology to validate and process their experiences, to communicate their experiences to significant others, to obtain support and redress, and to cope with their experiences and stabilize their psychological equilibrium. Professionals and others wishing to understand the psychological consequences of gender discrimination need terminology in order to communicate effectively with victimized individuals, as well as other colleagues; to pursue studies and other scholarly pursuits; and to process the significance of these events in the broader organizational, legal and social, psychological, and ethical arenas. For this purpose, the terms (1) gender and sex, (2) gender bias, (3) gender/sex discrimination, and (4) sexual harassment are defined both succinctly with regard to their use in this text and broadly with regard to their evolving meaning in relation to psychological consequences.

GENDER AND SEX: Sex refers to biological distinctions between males and females, based on differences in anatomy and physiology. Gender refers to the personal characteristics, abilities, and interests that are culturally assigned and socially constructed differently between the two sexes. Although conceptually distinct, sex and gender are intricately intertwined because gender characteristics are assigned based on whether one is born male or female. Scientists continue to argue regarding which characteristics are biologically innate and which are socially constructed. Burrell and Hearn (1989) provide a framework for these interrelations by conceptualizing sexuality and gender as follows: (1) biological essences, (2) outcomes of social roles, (3) fundamental political categories, and (4) communication practices and discourses of power. This broader definition is more relevant to understanding some of the psychological consequences of discrimination. Because of the current inherent difficulties in making distinctions between the terms of gender and sex and because they are often used interchangeably in the literature, they will be used interchangeably in this text.

GENDER BIAS: This is a term referring to situations in which some aspects of the work or educational experience differ based on the sex of the worker or student. The impact of this difference may be positive, negative, or neutral. Example 1—Neutral Impact: Waiters at a restaurant are required to wear black bow ties and trousers. Waitresses are required to wear red bow ties and trousers. Example 2—Negative Impact: Waiters and waitresses are both required to wear white T-shirts and black shorts, but female waitresses are required to wear T-shirts one size too small in order to emphasize their figures. Example 3— Positive Impact: Male and female waitstaff are assigned to different sections of a hotel restaurant. The female staff ends up working the bar restaurant, which is frequented by business clients who tend to leave significantly larger tips than other clients.

GENDER OR SEX DISCRIMINATION: This term refers to the types of gender bias that have a negative impact. The term has legal, as well as theoretical and psychological, definitions. Psychological consequences can be more readily inferred from the latter, but both definitions are of significance. Theoretically, gender discrimination has been described as (1) the unequal rewards that men and women receive in the workplace or academic environment because of their gender or sex differences (DiThomaso, 1989); (2) a process occurring in work or educational settings in which an individual is overtly or covertly limited access to an opportunity or a resource because of sex or is given the opportunity or the resource reluctantly and may face harassment for picking it (Roeske & Pleck, 1983); or (3) both. This latter definition includes the social forces that inhibit individuals from fully seeking appropriate lawful and educational work experiences outside those that are culturally defined as appropriate for their sex. Roeske and Pleck contend that this constitutes discrimination because these individuals are banned from opportunities and resources as effectively as if they had applied for and then been declined in the employment or the academic market. Theoretically, both men and women can experience sex discrimination; however, most in-house complaints, legal cases, and documented psychological consequences have reportedly involved women who were victimized. For this reason we will be dealing with the psychological consequences of victimized women in this text, unless otherwise specified.

The legal definition of sex discrimination is more limited than the theoretical concepts discussed thus far. Legally, sex discrimination can be proved if pervasive patterns of disparate treatment or disparate impact or the creation of a hostile environment can be documented to impact negatively upon a student or an employee of one sex as compared to the other. Sexual harassment, wage discrimination, and pregnancy discrimination are some of the most common forms of sexual discrimination brought to court (Women’s Legal Defense Fund, 1988).

Disparate treatment refers to situations where men and women are treated differently in the workplace or in academia, based upon their sex. For example, two employees with the same educational credentials apply for a job. The man is routed to management training and the woman to the support staff pool. A man and a woman with comparable credentials apply for a position, and the woman is denied the job under the assumption that she does not need to support a family. A man and a woman assert themselves for a promotion, but the man’s behavior is perceived positively as assertive and ambitious, whereas the woman’s behavior is perceived negatively as pushy and unattractive.

Disparate impact refers to behaviors, policies, procedures, and so on, that appear neutral on the surface in the workplace but that have a differentially negative impact on one sex over the other. For example, if an academic or a business institution has a limited parental leave policy or a limited personal day policy, this will have a differentially negative impact on female workers as long as they continue to assume primary responsibility for household and child-rearing responsibilities. If an academic institution’s tenure requirements place emphasis on a high output of publications and research during the first decade after graduate school, this will have a differentially negative impact on females who may need to reduce workloads for child-bearing purposes during this period but who have the capacity to increase productivity later in their professional work cycle, if given the opportunity.

A hostile environment refers to behaviors or other aspects of the work environment that make it hostile, offensive, intimidating, or abusive differentially to one sex or that occur as frequently or repetitively so as to alter the actual terms or conditions of employment, or both. A hostile environment does not require a power differential between the victimized person and the perpetrator. For example: (1) No private toilet facilities are provided on an offshore oil rig, so that the single female employee is forced to urinate in front of male coworkers in a way that is publicly humiliating; (2) Female medical students receive handouts during lectures that include crude anatomical drawings and devaluing comments about women; (3) Female students eating lunch in the school cafeteria are rated on attractiveness on scales of 1–10 by male students, and devaluing comments are made publicly regarding their bodies.

It is crucial to note that there are many forms of sex discrimination, as defined theoretically, that do not meet the criteria for sex discrimination, as defined legally. Serious psychological consequences can and do occur, independent of whether the legal criteria are met. For this reason, in this text the more expanded definition of gender discrimination, offered by Roeske and Pleck (1983), will be utilized, except in instances where specific references are made to the legal definition of sex discrimination.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT: Sexual harassment is the most widely studied and publicized form of sex discrimination, but ironically, it is a phenomenon with an evolving definition yet no universally agreed-upon operational terminology. Much of the complexity arises from the issue of differentiating the experience of sexual harassment from the perception of sexual harassment. Research has shown that people have different interpretations of the same experience (Stockdale, 1996). What follows, then, is a discussion of various concepts of harassment, with an emphasis both on the complexity of the issue and the psychological consequences that follow harassing experiences. Fitzgerald (1990) and Fitzgerald and Schullman (1993) divide definitions of sexual harassment into two broad categories: a priori and empirical. A priori definitions are derived from theoretical constructs and contain either a general statement regarding the nature of sexually harassing behaviors or specific lists of behaviors that constitute sexual harassment. Empirical definitions consist of lists of behaviors derived from databases developed through empirical investigations regarding what various groups of individuals perceive to be sexual harassment. The commonly accepted a priori definition of sexual harassment is contained in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines, which provide the standard for legal and institutional definitions of sexual harassment in the United States. These guidelines state Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitute sexual harassment when (1) submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual’s employment, (2) submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as a basis for employment decisions affecting such individual, or (3...