Why are liberal women more likely to say they have been sexually harassed?

A recent analysis by Zach Goldberg addressed an issue I raised years ago: Why do liberal women report more sexual harassment?  Goldberg found support for the view that liberal women are more sexual, and this invites unwanted attention.  Research more generally finds that badly behaved females -- delinquents, drug users, prostitutes -- are targeted for sexual abuse.

Goldberg takes a bivariate approach. Let's do a multivariate analysis, so we can see if promiscuity explains the liberal-harassment link after adjusting for the influence of other factors. Using GSS data on almost 1,500 women, and employing binary logistic regression, we get a significant coefficient of .15; the more liberal you are, the greater your risk of being harassed.

Now let's see if it drops as we enter controls. Young people are more liberal and might be sexually targeted. If we add age to the model, the coefficient drops to .12. Age explains a little bit of the link.

How about education? Educated women are more liberal and might be more sensitive about unwanted attention. When we add years of education, the political orientation coefficient drops to .11. Not much change.

How about living in a large city? City dwellers are more liberal, and perhaps urban men are more aggressive. When we add size of the population, the liberalism slope increases to .12, so city size does not help explain the liberal-harassment association.

How about being single? Single women are more liberal and might draw more attention. When being single is added to the model, the politics coefficient drops back to .11, so marital status doesn't matter much.

Okay, how about number of sex partners in the past year? When added to the equation, the liberalism estimate only drops to .107.  More sexual partners definitely predicts being harassed, but it does not appear to be the reason why liberal women are harassed more.

Since none of the examined variables explain much (age does a little), the answer seems to be something very close to political orientation. My guess is that social interactions are often ambiguous, and liberal women are inclined to interpret more interactions as sexually abusive. They've been indoctrinated to do so.    

Liberal men, sexist pigs?

I analyzed General Social Survey data a few years and showed that liberal women are more likely than conservatives to report being victims of sexual harassment. My take at the time was that liberal ideology makes women define normal sexual advances as inappropriate and abusive. But now I'm wondering if liberal women simply work around many liberal men, and liberal men simply lack the old-fashioned chivalry found more often among conservatives.


Here's a replication:

Percent reporting sexual harassment over past 5 years

Extremely liberal  23.7
Liberal  18.9
Slightly liberal  19.5 
Moderate  16.7  
Slightly conservative  19.3
Conservative  15.9
Extremely conservative  10.3

Sexual people are more likely to be victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment

A new study from Evolution and Human Behavior reports that highly sexual people are more likely to be victims and perpetrators of sexual harassment:

Sexual harassment and coercion have mainly been considered from a sex difference perspective. While traditional social science theories have explained harassment as male dominance of females, the evolutionary perspective has suggested that sex differences in the desire for sex are a better explanation. This study attempts to address individual differences associated with harassment from an evolutionary perspective. Considering previous research that has found links between sociosexual orientation inventory (SOI) and harassment, we consider whether this association can be replicated in a large, representative sample of high school students (N=1199) from a highly egalitarian culture. Expanding the previous studies which mainly focused on male perpetrators and female victims, we also examine females and males as both perpetrators and as victims. We believe that unrestricted sociosexuality motivates people to test whether others are interested in short-term sexual relations in ways that sometimes might be defined as harassment. Furthermore, unrestricted individuals signal their sociosexual orientation, and while they do not desire all individuals that react to these signals with sexual advances, they attract much more sexual advances than individuals with restricted sociosexual orientations, especially from other unrestricted members of the opposite sex. This more or less unconscious signaling thus makes them exploitable, i.e., harassable. We find that SOI is a predictor for sexual harassment and coercion among high school students. The paper concludes that, as expected, unrestricted sociosexuality predicts being both a perpetrator and a victim of both same-sex and opposite-sex harassment.

Race and sexual harassment

The Cain sexual harassment scandal makes me wish I had good survey data in order to look, for example, at whether there are racial differences. The Longitudinal Study of Violence Against Women did ask male college students if they have ever used their authority (as boss, teacher, camp counselor, supervisor, etc.) to get a female to engage in unwanted: 1) sexual activities short of intercourse, and 2) intercourse. Here are the percentages of men who answered yes (sample size = 821):
 

Percent using authority for sex play

Whites 2.3
Blacks 1.4
Others 4.2

Percent using authority for intercourse

Whites 3.0
Blacks 2.8
Others 6.2

None of the differences are significantly different due to the rarity of sexual harassment. Keep in mind that blacks and others (who are mostly Hispanic) are less likely to have positions of authority so their rates would probably be higher if they equaled whites in leadership positions. Plus, validity research has shown that black males are less willing than whites to admit to deviant behavior.

Patterns of sexual harassment: The General Social Survey asked 3,488 Americans if they have been sexually harassed on the job in the past 12 months. Here are the numbers:


Percent sexual harassed in past 12 months

Surveyed in 2000 4.8
In 2006 3.2

Female 5.8
Male 2.1

Straight woman 6.7
Straight man 2.2
Gay man 2.1
Lesbian 2.3

Single 6.6
Married 2.0
Separated 5.6
Divorced 5.5
Widowed 2.7

White 4.3
Black 4.5
Other 1.0

Age 20-24 7.2
25-29 6.8
30-34 6.2
35-39 3.3
40-44 3.7
45-49 3.1
50-54 2.4
55-59 2.3
60 plus 1.2

Italian 7.6
Irish 6.2
Scottish 6.4
French 5.6
Amerindian 5.0
English/Welsh 3.7
German 2.7
Polish 2.6
Norwegian 2.0
Mexican 1.6

Protestant 3.8
Catholic 3.9
Jewish 0.0
No religion 4.5

Less than high school 6.3
High school 3.5
Some college 4.6
College grad 4.8
Grad school 2.8

Working full-time 4.0
Part-time 3.4
Temp. not working 8.5

Low prestige job 5.7
Middle 3.4
High 4.0

Voted in 2000 for Bush 2.6
Gore 5.0
Nader 10.7

Has cheated on spouse 5.8
Has not 2.5

It always wrong to cheat 3.3
Almost always wrong 2.6
Sometimes wrong 5.3
Not wrong at all 5.7

Goes to bar almost daily 12.5
Several times a week 6.6
Never 2.7

Very happy 3.0
Pretty happy 3.5
Not to happy 5.7


There is a lot here. Let me only make a comment or two--you're input is appreciated. The number seems to be down a bit since 2000. I'd like to think the hysteria is subsiding, but the truth is probably that men have become even more neutered in the workplace. Myself, I never even compliment a woman on how she looks.

Homosexuals are not being harassed at high numbers, although I'm sure that elites assume they are.

For a profile of a harassed person, I'm getting the picture of a young, single, low status woman with a wilder type of lifestyle and a liberal orientation. She attracts attention, some of it unwanted, she probably works in a place with fewer castrated men (lower status men or higher status men in less sensitive fields) and her politics lead her to define ambiguous interactions as harassment.