Sexual harassment training and men's motivation to work with women.

With the #MeToo movement generating renewed public attention to the problem of sexual misconduct, it is an important time to assess how sexual harassment training affects men's motivation to work with women. We conducted an experiment in which we exposed undergraduate men to sexual harassment policy training and then assessed their motivation to work with a female partner on a decision-making task. We employed a 2 × 2 design in which participants were randomly assigned to a policy condition (sexual harassment policy or control) and a team role (leader or subordinate). We found that policy training did not affect whether participants chose a female or male partner. However, we found that policy training led male participants to rate female partners as more dissimilar to them and that leadership status moderated the effect of policies on men's expressed anxiety about working with a female partner. Findings have implications for reducing sexual harassment and gender inequality.

Communicating About Affirmative Consent: How the Threat of Punishment Affects Policy Support and Gender Stereotypes.

Colleges are increasingly adopting "affirmative consent" policies, which require students to obtain conscious and voluntary consent at each stage of sexual activity. Although this is an important step forward in violence prevention, very little is known about how best to present the policies to students. This is important, as research on sexual harassment policy training finds that training can reinforce traditional gender beliefs, which undermines policy goals. Building on this literature, we argue that affirmative consent policy trainings emphasizing punishment will increase support for affirmative consent but will reinforce traditional gender beliefs. We tested our predictions with an experiment in which we randomly assigned undergraduate participants to one of three conditions where they read an excerpt of (a) an affirmative consent policy that emphasized the threat of punishment, (b) an affirmative consent policy that emphasized a normative/moral message, or (c) an ergonomic workstation policy that served as our control condition. We found that punishment framing increased men's support for the policy, had no effect on their likelihood to comply, and increased their perception that "most people" hold men to be more powerful than women. For women, the punishment and normative framings increased support equally, but the normative framing actually decreased likelihood to comply. The policy conditions had no effect on women's gender beliefs. The results suggest that while an emphasis on punishment can help legitimate nonconsensual sex as a social problem, it will not necessarily increase college students' compliance with affirmative consent, and runs the risk of activating essentialist stereotypes about gender difference. As the issue of campus sexual assault becomes increasingly politicized and contested, our findings highlight the need for more research.

Gender and venture capital decision-making: the effects of technical background and social capital on entrepreneurial evaluations.

Research on gender and workplace decision-making tends to address either supply-side disparities between men's and women's human and social capital, or demand-side differences in the status expectations of women and men workers. In addition, this work often relies on causal inferences drawn from empirical data collected on worker characteristics and their workplace outcomes. In this study, we demonstrate how tangible education and work history credentials - typically associated with supply-side characteristics - work in tandem with cultural beliefs about gender to influence the evaluative process that underlies venture capital decisions made in high-growth, high-tech entrepreneurship. Using an experimental design, we simulate funding decisions by venture capitalists (VCs) for men and women entrepreneurs that differ in technical background and the presence of important social ties. We demonstrate the presence of two distinct aspects of VCs' evaluation: that of the venture and that of the entrepreneur, and find that the gender of the entrepreneur influences evaluations most when the person, rather than the venture, is the target of evaluation. Technical background qualifications moderate the influence of gendered expectations, and women receive more of a payoff than men from having a close contact to the evaluating VC. We discuss the implications for future research on gender and work.

How do sexual harassment policies shape gender beliefs? An exploration of the moderating effects of norm adherence and gender.

Sexual harassment laws have led to important organizational changes in the workplace yet research continues to document resistance to their implementation and backlash against the people who mobilize such laws. Employing experimental research methods, this study proposes and tests a theory specifying the mechanisms through which sexual harassment policies affect gender beliefs. The findings show evidence that sexual harassment policies strengthen unequal gender beliefs among men and women most committed to traditional gender interaction norms. I also find that men and women's different structural locations in the status hierarchy lead to different, but related sets of concerns about the status threats posed by sexual harassment policies. By specifying the social psychological processes through which sexual harassment law affects beliefs about men and women, this study sets the stage for investigating ways to make laws designed to reduce inequality between social groups more effective.