A Smile Is Not a Smile Is Not a Smile

by PRESCA AHN and ADRIEL SAPORTA
Yale Psy­chol­ogy Pro­fes­sor Mar­i­anne LaFrance gave a talk on sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment on April 8. Broad Recog­ni­tion sat in and took notes.

April 2009

Bad things.

At the April 8 Women Fac­ulty Forum event “Sub­tle Sex­ual Harass­ment,” Psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor Mar­i­anne LaFrance intro­duced her­self as an expert in sub­tle, uncon­scious mes­sages that result in what she called—with an irony not lost on her audience—“bad things.”

LaFrance’s euphemism, which drew laugh­ter from atten­dees, was fit­ting for a sub­ject that remains largely unac­knowl­edged by pub­lic dis­cus­sion: the less vio­lent vari­eties of sex­ual harassment.

“I’m inter­ested in the kind of sex­ual harass­ment that may not ever reach the stage of being a for­mal com­plaint, let alone being lit­i­gated, because it flies under the radar,” said LaFrance, assert­ing that sub­tlety was not syn­ony­mous with harmlessness.

Before speak­ing about her own work in the study of sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment, LaFrance sketched out the two cat­e­gories of legally action­able sex­ual harass­ment orig­i­nated by Cather­ine McK­in­non and later used by the Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­nity Com­mis­sion in defin­ing sex­ual harass­ment: the more promi­nent “quid pro quo” harass­ment, wherein one per­son overtly or indi­rectly indi­cates to another that sex­ual favors are a con­di­tion of pro­fes­sional ben­e­fit or con­tin­ued employ­ment, and “hos­tile work envi­ron­ment” harass­ment, wherein dis­crim­i­na­tory speech, ges­tures, and sit­u­a­tions are a per­sis­tent con­di­tion of a person’s work or study environment.

The lat­ter pre­oc­cu­pies LaFrance for the same rea­son that it evades legal action: it is more dif­fi­cult to doc­u­ment, to avoid, and to com­bat than the for­mer. Iden­ti­fy­ing quid pro quo harass­ment is a rel­a­tively straight­for­ward affair, since one instance is enough to demon­strate its exis­tence, and the inter­ac­tion of power and sex­ual acqui­es­cence is read­ily mapped. Hos­tile work envi­ron­ment harass­ment, or sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment, takes more insid­i­ous forms: graf­fiti, pic­tures, sounds, ges­tures, casual remarks, and—most effec­tively— jokes that take place at a low level over a longer period of time. (“Am I being over­sen­si­tive?” a stu­dent may won­der, when a trusted pro­fes­sor makes a few offen­sive jokes. “He’s a good adviser. Let’s let it go.” Of such sit­u­a­tions, LaFrance said, “This is the time that you wish for bla­tant sex­ual coer­cion, because you can name it what it is.”)

Cases of hos­tile work envi­ron­ment harass­ment rarely meet with cor­po­rate action or legal redress. Rather, they are resolved when the vic­tims of harass­ment develop suit­able ways to cope. LaFrance said that report­ing or con­fronting an instance of sub­tle harass­ment was the “last [and] def­i­nitely least” resort for most threat­ened groups, espe­cially women. Pop­u­lar strate­gies, noted LaFrance, include ignor­ing offen­sive behav­ior in the hopes that it will go away, or avoid­ing it alto­gether by mov­ing away from the office or class­room in which it takes place.
But the time-honored tech­nique, espe­cially for women, is to defuse the sit­u­a­tion through a kind of coop­er­a­tion. In an over­whelm­ing num­ber of cases, women will rede­fine what is hap­pen­ing to them by “becom­ing one of the boys”—by plac­ing them­selves in the role of aggres­sor rather than the role of vic­tim— and prov­ing they can take the joke. Even­tu­ally, the sit­u­a­tion will dis­si­pate, and they can move on with their sense of agency intact.

What it costs to grin and bear it.

Over the course of her talk, LaFrance expressed her con­cerns about the psy­cho­log­i­cal costs incurred by women who do not con­front sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment. She pointed to data that sug­gested that depres­sion, irri­tabil­ity, anx­i­ety and con­fu­sion are more likely to occur in women whose harass­ment is “not expressly quid pro quo.” Fre­quent absences from school and work, and even dropouts (or “opt-outs,” as they are some­times euphem­ized), are com­mon for women in hos­tile work envi­ron­ments. Self-esteem and gen­eral life sat­is­fac­tion are lower for these women. More inter­est­ingly, data sug­gests that hos­tile work envi­ron­ment harass­ment tends under­mine basic opti­mism about per­sonal relationships.

Achieve­ment, too, suf­fers under con­di­tions of sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment: work qual­ity and moti­va­tion decline, as do grades and pro­duc­tiv­ity on the job. In a cyn­i­cal world, this last effect is the most impor­tant. As a psy­chol­o­gist, how­ever, LaFrance is more inter­ested in the vic­tims them­selves. Her lab­o­ra­tory research has focused on the dis­cernible symp­toms exhib­ited by women who are sub­tly harassed.

La France stressed the impor­tance, when study­ing sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment, of rely­ing on real-time clin­i­cal obser­va­tion rather than the ret­ro­spec­tive reports of vic­tims: “Women can’t all be mis­con­stru­ing what hap­pened to them, but courts do; they bring in experts to point out why mem­ory is com­pletely dis­torted and for­get­ting is actu­ally adap­tive. We get on with things in our lives because we for­get a lot that goes on… and thank god for it. Sec­ondly, when you ask some­one to respond ver­bally, there are cer­tain things set in motion just by virtue of things hav­ing to be said in words.” She also pointed out the pos­si­bil­ity that past vic­tims of sex­ual harass­ment are more likely to respond to sex­ual harass­ment sur­veys, mak­ing pro­por­tions dif­fi­cult to measure.

So LaFrance is chiefly inter­ested in observ­ing behav­iors, espe­cially sub­tle but telling behav­iors like facial expression.

Come on, it’s only a joke.

In envi­ron­ments where the harassers are risk averse—elite schools full of high achiev­ers, for exam­ple, and many white-collar work­places— aggres­sion often takes a cow­ardly form: jokes at the expense of a dis­ad­van­taged group. “Psy­chol­o­gists know that if you really want to stick it to some­one, tease them, make them the butt of a joke—but do it in a way that looks innocu­ous,” LaFrance observed. “Then you say, ‘Oh come on, you know I was only kidding.”

Her claim was sup­ported by one of her own exper­i­ments, which mea­sured women’s reac­tions to sex­ist jokes. In the study, female par­tic­i­pants of all ages were pre­pared with a ver­sion of the truth: that the psy­chol­o­gists were try­ing to see what the par­tic­i­pants’ age group found unfunny or unfunny. Par­tic­i­pants were seated at a com­puter and heard a num­ber of pre-recorded jokes played; they were then asked to rate the jokes’ fun­ni­ness and emo­tional effect (how much hap­pi­ness, anx­i­ety, fear, etc. they felt at the moment) on scales that appeared on the com­puter mon­i­tor. Mean­while, a hid­den cam­era recorded their facial expres­sions as they lis­tened; LaFrance’s team would later code these expres­sions accord­ing to the FACS (Facial Action Cod­ing Sys­tem), which codes mea­sur­able mus­cu­lar changes on the sur­face of the face.

Par­tic­i­pants either heard seven sex­ist jokes or seven lawyer jokes. Exam­ples of the sex­ist jokes:

Q: How can you tell when a pro­fes­sional woman achieves orgasm?
A: She drops her briefcase.

Q: What do you do when your dish­washer stops work­ing?
A: Slap her and tell her to get back to work.

Unsur­pris­ingly, the sex­ist jokes ranked a lit­tle lower than the non­sex­ist jokes for “fun­ni­ness.” The more inter­est­ing result was that women’s response to sex­ist jokes went beyond sim­ply find­ing the joke funny or unfunny. In the case of feel­ings of anger, hos­til­ity, and dis­gust, the sex­ist jokes got higher rat­ings than did the lawyer jokes.

Researchers also saw a lot of non-verbal reac­tions asso­ci­ated with rejec­tion, such as the eye roll and the mouth cover, indi­cat­ing that the jokes had a greater psy­cho­log­i­cal impact on women than other jokes. Women of every age did not just sim­ply expe­ri­ence the jokes as funny or unfunny; they tended to show non-verbal signs of reject­ing the jokes, and reported emo­tions that jokes are not sup­posed to elicit.

What would you do?

Another of LaFrance’s exper­i­ments points up a com­mon human trait: we aren’t good judges of our own future actions. We are opti­mistic, not real­is­tic, about how we would han­dle dif­fi­cult situations.

This was over­whelm­ingly true of female col­lege stu­dents in two stud­ies of sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment on job inter­views. The first study described a job inter­view sce­nario to research sub­jects, who were asked to state how they would feel, what they would think, and what they would do in response. The sec­ond study lit­er­ally placed research sub­jects in a job inter­view sce­nario. The objec­tive: to mea­sure whether responses in the real sit­u­a­tion matched responses in the imag­ined sit­u­a­tion. The answer: a def­i­nite no.

In the “imag­ine” study, par­tic­i­pants read through a sce­nario that included the job inter­view locale, what the inter­viewer looked like, and what the ques­tions were. They were then asked to write a para­graph or two about what they thought they would feel like. “The key,” said LaFrance, “was to ask peo­ple what they would do, not what one should do.”

The “real” study mea­sured actual reac­tions to sex­u­al­ized job inter­view ques­tions. LaFrance’s team used a method that barely passed the Inter­nal Review Board: it issued a news­pa­per ad, no gen­der indi­cated, announc­ing hir­ing for the Psy­chol­ogy Depart­ment. All of the inter­views were unob­tru­sively video­taped (con­sent was pro­cured by inform­ing respon­dents that the Depart­ment was train­ing new inter­view­ers and that they might be video­taped for qual­ity con­trol pur­poses). When inter­vie­wees arrived, they were ran­domly assigned to one of three male inter­view­ers; they were also ran­domly assigned to receive harass­ing ques­tions or non-harassing questions.

Both sets of ques­tions con­tained typ­i­cal job inter­view ques­tions inter­spersed with more unusual ques­tions. The non-harassing set con­tained ques­tions like, “Do you have a best friend?”, “Do you think it’s impor­tant to believe in God?”, and “Do peo­ple find you mor­bid?” The harass­ing set asked ques­tions like, “Do you have a boyfriend?” and “Do you think it’s impor­tant for women to wear bras to work?” The jux­ta­po­si­tion of ques­tions was cru­cial. “What do you think you have to con­tribute?” was imme­di­ately fol­lowed by “Do peo­ple find you desir­able?” LaFrance explained that she devised the ques­tions to be just inap­pro­pri­ate enough that harass­ment would be “in the air.”

Women who were given the “imag­ine” sce­nar­ios reported lit­tle fear but a sub­stan­tial amount of anger. 6% said they would refocus—that is, try to get off the topic and intro­duce a new one. 41% would nego­ti­ate; for exam­ple, in response to the ques­tion “Do peo­ple find you desir­able?” they would respond, “Do you mean as a mem­ber of a team?” 33% said they would object to what was going on. 68% said they would refuse to answer. And 16% said they would leave the interview.

The real­ity was the reverse. Women placed in the “real” sce­nario exhib­ited behav­iors closely asso­ci­ated with fear; almost none exhib­ited anger or rejected the sit­u­a­tion. Of the women who were sub­tly harassed, 52% did noth­ing to coun­ter­act inap­pro­pri­ate ques­tion­ing; 20% refo­cused; 36% nego­ti­ated; and 4% objected. 0% refused to answer. 0% left the interview.

Smile like you mean it.

Authen­tic smiles, which are almost impos­si­ble for humans to fake, involve action of the zygotic major (the “smile mus­cle”) and the mus­cle that encom­passes the eyes and pulls up the cheek; they are called Duchenne smiles, after the French physi­cian who dis­cov­ered them. Social smiles, which humans often fake as a defen­sive action, involve only the zygotic major. Explain­ing the dif­fer­ence between Duchenne smiles and social smiles, LaFrance stressed a basic tenet of those who study facial expres­sions: “A smile is not a smile is not a smile.”

Look­ing at smiles alone, and ignor­ing smile type, would lead to the con­clu­sion that those inter­vie­wees who were harassed were hap­pi­est. After all, they were show­ing the most smil­ing. The fact of the mat­ter, how­ever, is that they were only show­ing the most social smiles. When asked after­wards about the inter­view, the par­tic­i­pants who showed the most fake social smiles also reported find­ing the inter­view sex­ist, and their inter­viewer a harasser.
Here’s another turn of the screw: women who respond with social smiles actu­ally end up under­min­ing them­selves. When LaFrance’s team asked MBA stu­dents to rate the taped inter­vie­wees, women who showed fake smiles were rated to be less com­pe­tent, less intel­li­gent, and less likely to be hired. So these women’s adap­tive response to being harassed ended up coun­ter­act­ing their goals.

Finally, the stress of being harassed dis­rupted these women’s abil­ity to per­form. LaFrance found that harassed inter­vie­wees exhib­ited more speech defi­cien­cies like pauses, ums and ahs, excess words that add noth­ing, repeated words, and false starts. And these defi­cien­cies didn’t appear in response to harass­ing ques­tions; there was sim­ply a lagged effect from pre­vi­ous, inap­pro­pri­ate questions.

Ulti­mately, LaFrance found a rift between real and imag­ined behav­ior in response to sub­tle sex­ual harass­ment in for­mal envi­ron­ments. The real emo­tion is fear—not anger, as one would hope to feel. “The real behav­ior,” said LaFrance, “is to ignore, where one would have pre­ferred to confront.”

Presca Ahn is a junior in Yale Col­lege and the Editor-in-Chief of Broad Recog­ni­tion. Adriel Saporta is a sopho­more in Yale Col­lege and the Man­ag­ing Edi­tor of Broad Recog­ni­tion.