ABSTRACT
Although men and women have coexisted within the workforce for some time, only within the past few decades has there been formal recognition that employees may be negatively targeted and unfairly treated because of their gender. This recent recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace has spurred interest in scholars from the legal arena to the social sciences (Wiener and Gutek, 1999). Thus far, social scientists have mainly focused on estimating how often sexual harassment occurs, the causes of sexual harassment, the consequences of sexual harassment, and how laypeople and jurors perceive incidents of sexual harassment (Goodman-Delahunty, 1999; Wiener and Gutek, 1999). In this chapter, we examine the findings in these burgeoning research areas. We first review the current state of sexual harassment case law to provide a legal background for the subsequent research. We then turn to the social science research on the antecedents and consequences of sexual harassment. Last, we examine the factors that influence juror decisions about liability and damage awards in sexual harassment cases.
