Why do men sexually harass women at work? Science offers two explanations – but only one of them holds up

What causes workplace sexual harassment? How can we continue to better understand it? And what can be done to prevent it?

Successful answers to questions like these need a good scientific explanation. But which explanation should we draw on?

Two very different explanations circulate among social scientists. In new research, we compared how the two stack up – and found one of them was a clear winner.

Evolved sexual tendencies or maintaining gender hierarchies?

On one view, sexual harassment – as the name implies – is all about sexuality. According to the evolutionary psychology research program, men and women have evolved different psychological mechanisms to solve the different challenges they faced to successfully reproduce back in the Pleistocene epoch.

For men, these adaptive mechanisms include a greater interest in casual sex, and a tendency to mistakenly conclude that women are sexually interested in them. Women, in contrast, evolved to be more sensitive to potential threats to their sexual autonomy – and therefore perceive men’s advances as harassing.

But for social science scholars informed by the gender hierarchy – the idea that men hold more power and status than women – sexual harassment is “an expression of workplace sexism, not sexuality or sexual desire”. It is a mechanism for preserving work roles as masculine terrain, and pushing back against threats to men’s higher status within a workplace.

These two accounts offer very different ways of explaining workplace sexual harassment. So how do we go about deciding which one to draw on?

It might be tempting to think one scientific view is preferred over another for political reasons: he likes the evolutionary psychology account because he is a misogynist; or she likes the gender hierarchy account because she is blinded by her feminist ideology.

Putting explanations to the test

These accusations don’t get us very far. Fortunately, the philosophy of science gives us three well-established criteria for what makes for a good scientific explanation.

These three criteria flow from thinking about what scientific explanations are for.

The intrinsic value of explanations is that they provide understanding. We understand something better when we have identified its causes.

When it comes to sexual harassment, ideally the causes we identify will explain a broad range of sexual harassment phenomena. Sexual harassment is not just the “powerful man exploits attractive female subordinate” scenario that tends to get the most press attention.

Scientific explanations also have instrumental value. The causal explanations scientists produce can be used to generate new predictions that can be tested in future research. In other words, a good scientific explanation is also fruitful.

Scientists’ causal explanations can also be used to identify factors that can be manipulated or controlled. This gives society potential interventions to shape outcomes we care about, such as reducing workplace sexual harassment.

Two explanations, head to head

In our recently published research, we used these three criteria for a good scientific explanation to compare the evolutionary psychology and gender hierarchy maintenance accounts of workplace sexual harassment. So what did we find?

First, we found that the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation was clearly superior when it came to identifying causes that make sense of a broad range of workplace sexual harassment phenomena.

Evolutionary psychology makes sense of sexual coercion and some forms of unwanted sexual attention, to be sure. But research shows these kinds of behaviours almost invariably go hand-in-hand with sexist jokes, crude sexual remarks and sexually degrading imagery, such as porn.

None of these behaviours are plausibly about trying to gain sexual favours, even though some are sexual in nature. These behaviours are called “gender harassment” –which is the most common form of sexual harassment.

Unlike evolutionary psychology, gender hierarchy maintenance can explain all three forms of harassment. Demands for sexual favours, sexist remarks and requests for note-taking can all be understood as behaviours that reinforce traditional gender roles and confer greater status and authority to men.

Second, we found that both explanations have given rise to fruitful research programs that generate and test predictions. However, evolutionary psychology faces a challenge here.

The theory’s core prediction is that ancestral men who misperceived sexual interest in women tended to enjoy greater reproductive success, which is impossible to test. It is also plausible that sex pests would have faced disadvantages within close-knit communities. Without a time machine, this prediction can never be tested.

Third, we found the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation has the edge when it comes to identifying effective interventions. Flattening organisational hierarchies, and loosening the link between status and masculinity, are potential ways to change things.

Evolutionary psychology points instead to interventions such as educating men about what counts as sexual harassment. However, evidence suggests this kind of training is not effective. And, of course, the only way to really change people’s evolved adaptive mechanisms would be to change their brains and genes – which we can’t do.

Gender hierarchy maintenance is a better explanation

Our research points to the value of understanding workplace sexual harassment through the lens of gender hierarchy maintenance. This offers hope for the future of workplace culture: it suggests men are not essentially predisposed to be sexual harassers, with little that can be done to alter their evolved natures.

Instead, sexual harassment is best understood as a consequence of our current social and cultural environment. And this is something we can shape to facilitate a better and safer future at work.