Comparing Gender Hierarchy and Evolutionary Psychology Explanations of Workplace Sexual Harassment

Abstract Understanding and preventing workplace sexual harassment requires a good scientific explanation. At present, two scientific explanations compete in the literature. According to the gender hierarchy maintenance account, sexual harassment is a mechanism for maintaining workplace gender hierarchies of power and status, while Evolutionary Psychologists posit that sexual harassment is caused by conflicts between evolved, sex-specific mating and reproductive strategies and sexual psychologies. This article draws on established criteria for scientific explanations to evaluate these competing explanations of workplace sexual harassment. It concludes that the gender hierarchy maintenance explanation better meets the desiderata of identifying causes that make sense of a broad range of sexual harassment phenomena, generating testable predictions, and identifying interventions.