From “Wired to Lead: Being the Leader the Church Didn’t Think You Could Be” by Suzanne Nadell
If you research the subject of bias, you will see many articles pointing to a 1989 study that focused on women working in a factory. This decades-old study compared women who were machinists to women on the assembly line. The reason those two groups were compared is that women were not traditionally machinists but worked the assembly line. At the time of the study, both groups of women dealt with the same number of men at work.
When The New York Times interviewed the study’s author, Dr. Nancy Baker, a psychologist from Los Angeles, she said: “On all 28 items of a sexual harassment scale, ranging from lewd remarks to sexual assault, the women machinists had the highest scores…The more non-traditional the job for women, the more sexual harassment. Women surgeons and investment bankers rank among the highest for harassment.” In the same article Dr. Louise Fitzgerald, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, said this about women in the blue-collar workplace: “Men see women as invading a masculine environment. These are guys whose sexual harassment has nothing whatever to do with sex. They’re trying to scare women off a male preserve.” Fitzgerald and others have said that in some cases men who grew up in male-dominated environments don’t know how to act. I’d argue that that time has long passed and the excuses for poor behavior need to end.