New Study Reveals Why Men Initiate Sexual Advances In The Workplace. It’s All About The Power!
A workplace is a place of worship for most people. You know, a place where they can work hard and get closer to their dreams. But workplaces have, lately, turned into a place of inequality and a place where power display and ego come into play. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of gender politics that happen in most workplaces putting women at a disadvantage. And the biggest proof of this is the fact that men tend to advance faster than women because they are considered superior. Every move made by a woman is scrutinised and she has to constantly prove her worth but men get away with doing the bare minimum and still being patted on the back.
Furthermore, it doesn’t stop there. Power politics go to another toxic level as men try to initiate sexual advances in the workplace. A new study just tried to dive further into this sexual tendency to understand more about power dynamics in a workplace.
What Did This New Study Find?
Published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, this new study shows that men tend to initiate sexual advances toward senior women to boost their perception of power. It further revealed that men attempting to make sexual advances toward women in senior positions is more common than we’d like to believe. Let’s be honest, sexual advances at work has become a part and parcel of our lives, be it consensual or otherwise. Women have been dealing with harassment and unwanted advances for the longest time but the sociological function at play here remains a total mystery.
The study claims that making sexual advances toward a senior woman is a man’s way to boost their perception of power by inviting patriarchal rules to power politics at work. The study also sought to look into the self-perception of men who describe themselves as “flirts”. Even these men aren’t aware that their actions can be perceived as harassment. “People generally have positive associations with being a flirt or being charming or having sex appeal. But when we take on that identity, it leads to certain behavioural patterns that reinforce the identity. And then, people use that identity as an excuse,” expressed the lead author Laura Kray, a psychologist from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
This puts many reported instances of harassment into context. Moreover, it also reveals a deeply messed up and dark side of workplace relationships. What’s worse is that women are viewed merely as conquests that enhance the status of anyone who has or attempts to gain sexual access to them. This means the harassment isn’t just an abuse of power but it’s also a struggle to achieve power. I mean, wow. This study just proved that men have literally discovered an entirely new route to ‘sleep their way to the top’ and yet, the phrase is as expected, used so actively for women instead of men.
No doubt working women face more discrimination than men in the workplace. A restaurant owner recently shared a rant online detailing how her male staff have become creepy and unprofessional after she recently hired an attractive, young waitress. In her lengthy post titled, ‘I hired an attractive waitress and it’s gotten weird’. She added that the male staff started showing their true colours and she even had to fire a cook for the safety of the waitress as he tried to ask her out repeatedly even though he is married.
Also Read: Restaurant Owner Fires Male Chef After He Started Acting Creepy Towards Young Waitress. Need More Employers To Do The Right Thing
I mean this not only proves that people have been equating sex with power for a very long time, but it also confirmed the fact that women are at risk in their workplaces, no matter what their position lies, on the scaler chain. I mean, this is just awful. Women aren’t safe anywhere because we’re always seen a set of boobs and a vagina. It’s heartbreaking that even a woman in a senior position has been turned into a conquest. Can we ever expect some respect and humanity from this world?
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