Presumed Patriarchy: How a CEO's Masculine Appearance Affects Perceptions of Sexual Harassment in Organizations

Abstract

Workplace sexual harassment remains an insidious yet pervasive component of organizational life. Building on research that has established that leaders play an important role in condoning or revoking sexual harassment, we theorize that a CEO's appearance—specifically, the extent to which their face is prototypically masculine—can influence employee assumptions about the patriarchal nature of organizational hierarchy, which, in turn, influences their perceptions of the degree to which sexual harassment will be tolerated. We test these ideas in three complementary studies. Study 1 observes that employees in large organizations headed by a CEO with a more masculine face report more instances of sexual harassment in online reviews. Study 2 uses an experiment to show that CEO facial masculinity drives followers’ perceptions that sexual harassment is tolerated in an organization by increasing the presumption that the organization is patriarchal. Study 3 affirms these results with a sample of new employees both before and after their first day on the job. Together, these studies provide evidence that a presumption of patriarchy increases the perceived tolerance for sexual harassment, which yields more observations of sexual harassment in the workplace.