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Studies reveal women don't react to sexual harassment the way they imagine they would

Most women predict they'd feel angry and confront the harasser, but that's not how real-life scenarios played out.

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When it comes to sexual harassment, imagined reactions play out differently in real life.

It's easy to imagine what we'd do or how we'd respond to imaginary scenarios, playing the hero in an emergency, speaking up when we witness an injustice or confronting someone who mistreats us.

Real life, however, can feel different than we expect it to as emotions and fight-or-flight chemicals flood our minds and bodies.

Two studies illustrate this reality when it comes to responding to sexual harassment, finding that imagined responses don't tend to play out in real-life harassment scenarios.

A 2002 study published by Julie A. Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance in the Journal of Social Issues examined the way women anticipated they would respond to sexual harassment in imagined scenarios vs. how women respond when facing a real sexual harassment scenario in a job interview and found that the two did not match up.

Psychologist Kaidi W, Ph.D. shared excerpts from the study on X, illustrating the study's key findings.

Setting up a real sexual harassment scenario posed an ethical dilemma for the study design, as they couldn't create severe harassment without the subjects knowing. They created a job interview that participants thought was real and had the male interviewer intersperse three sexually intrusive questions amidst regular questions:

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Do people find you desirable?"

"Do you think it's important for women to wear bras to work?"

When presented with such questions in an imagined scenario, women shared how they predicted they'd respond. "The most prominent emotion women imagined they'd feel was anger (27%), while fear was rarely mentioned (2%)," Wu wrote. "62% of women said they'd confront the interviewer. 68% said they'd refuse to answer at least one harassing questions."

However, when the researchers set up the job interview, women facing the questions in real life reacted very differently. None of them refused to answer all the questions, none confronted the interviewer, none left the interview, and none reported the harasser to the supervisor.

Notably, the most prominent emotion women experienced in the real scenario was fear. "Simply put, women imagined feeling angry, but women in the situation were actually afraid," the authors wrote.

"It is noteworthy that the self-reports of being afraid were not due merely to actually being in an interview situation in contrast to an imagined interview situation," the authors added. "For when we compared interviewees in the sexually harassing interview to those who got the surprising but nonharassing questions, we found that women who were asked harassing questions reported feeling significantly more afraid than did their nonharassed counterparts."

Another finding was that women facing the harassing questions exhibited more non-Duchenne smiling (basically feigning a smile) than the others. Non-Duchenne smiling is associated with accommodation or appeasement as opposed to genuine pleasure. The authors suggest that the women may have been smiling in such a manner to signal that they were "willing to play by the rules so that they could get out of that place."

Another study from 2023 also found a gap between how people think they'd respond to a sexually harassing situation vs. how they actually do.

A study by the University of Exeter, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, found that people who imagined a sexual harassment scenario predicted that they would feel a strong need to take formal action, such as reporting the harassment to authorities.

But people who had actually experienced harassment shared different needs that often overrode the need for immediate justice

Senior author Manuela Barreto, from the University of Exeter said: “We found there is a widely held belief that quick and formal reporting is the correct response to sexual harassment. It’s what’s generally meant with the phrase ‘coming forward.' Yet most people who are sexually harassed do not report it formally and those who do, often report the offence a significant time after it happened."

“There is an assumption that those who experience sexual harassment are primarily guided by their desire for justice," shared lead author Thomas Morton of the University of Copenhagen who worked on the research at the University of Exeter. "But this research shows that peoples’ needs are wider than what others might expect, and include needs for safety, personal control, and for life to just return to normal. Of all the needs that people expressed, the need for justice was not the highest priority. This might explain why people don’t take the kind of formal actions, like reporting to police, that others expect them to."

"If you have not experienced sexual harassment, it is hard to accurately anticipate what you might need, and therefore what you would do to satisfy those needs," Morton added. "Our research suggests that the assumptions people make are often wrong, or at least don’t reflect what the people who have experienced sexual harassment say they need.”

The Me Too movement brought needed awareness to how often women face sexual harassment, but it also raised a lot of questions about why women don't confront or come forward to report it. These studies are a good reminder that we don't truly know how we are going to feel or respond until we are facing a real-life scenario ourselves, so we can't truly judge how another person handles an experience with sexual harassment. They also help us expand our understanding of how easy it is to underestimate fear and a sense of security as primary motivating factors in our responses, even if we are convinced our righteous anger and justice will override them.

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Monica Lewinsky bravely shares her evolving views on consent in the workplace.

In some ways, Monica Lewinsky will always be defined by her moment in history as the White House intern who had an affair with the president that nearly cost him his job.

However, Lewinksy has made bold strides in breaking out of that singular narrative in recent years, speaking out against bullying and, in certain circles, gaining notoriety as a beloved feminist icon.

Yet she's always defended the power dynamic in her relationship with Bill Clinton. "Sure my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: It was a consensual relationship," she said as recently as 2014.

But it appears Lewinsky's stance has evolved.

"I'm beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot," she wrote in Vanity Fair's March 2018 edition.

​Photo by Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images.​

She's now speaking out about how unequal workplace dynamic affected her relationship with Clinton.

When Lewinsky's affair with Clinton was a national scandal, she was often portrayed as the villain in the story. Now, it's less about heroes and villains and more about the nature of how power and roles in the workplace affect romantic relationships — even ones that are seemingly consensual.

"Now, at 44, I'm beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern," she wrote.

[rebelmouse-image 19345835 dam="1" original_size="1024x799" caption="The Clinton family in 1998 during the height of the Lewinsky scandal. Photo via White House Photograph Office/U.S. National Archives/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]The Clinton family in 1998 during the height of the Lewinsky scandal. Photo via White House Photograph Office/U.S. National Archives/Wikimedia Commons.

Lewinksy isn't changing her story. The lens through which that story is viewed is changing.

She stands by her story, but it's the way the story played in the broader culture that's now being scrutinized. And Lewinsky is very clear that this change in thinking may never have come about were it not for the women telling their own stories as the #MeToo movement gained momentum:

"I — we — owe a huge debt of gratitude to the #MeToo and Time’s Up heroines. They are speaking volumes against the pernicious conspiracies of silence that have long protected powerful men when it comes to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and abuse of power."

By speaking out, Lewinsky is showing how we're all growing thanks to this movement.

Lewinsky isn't trying to rewrite history. In fact, she's very open that in some ways her thinking on a moment that has largely defined her has only just begun. Instead, she's transforming a moment once rooted in shame into a learning moment for men and women everywhere.

The mechanics of consent may sound simple enough, but the line between office flirtation and harassment can be murky. It's not only about the obvious cases of people treating others badly; it's also how the power of our culture and workplaces shape those relationships in the first place.

Like Lewinsky says about herself, we are as a culture really only beginning to think about the potential nuances of these power dynamics. And the willingness to reconsider and even challenge the way we once viewed past transgressions can only help us map that path forward.

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