This collection of studies tested aspects of Cortina's theory of selective incivility as a "modern" manifestation of sexism and racism in the workplace and also tested an extension of that theory to ageism. Survey data came from employees in three organizations: a city government (N = 369), a law enforcement agency (N = 653), and the U.S. military (N = 15,497). According to analyses of simple mediation, target gender and race (but not age) affected vulnerability to uncivil treatment on the job, which in turn predicted intent to leave that job. Evidence of moderated mediation also emerged, with target gender and race interacting to predict uncivil experiences, such that women of color reported the worst treatment. The article concludes with implications for interventions to promote civility and nondiscrimination in organizations.

This study challenges the common legal and organizational practice of privileging sexual advance forms of sex-based harassment, while neglecting gender harassment. Survey data came from women working in two male-dominated contexts: the military and the legal profession. Their responses to the Sexual Experiences Questionnaire (SEQ) revealed five typical profiles of harassment: low victimization, gender harassment, gender harassment with unwanted sexual attention, moderate victimization, and high victimization. The vast majority of harassment victims fell into one of the first two groups, which described virtually no unwanted sexual advances. When compared to non-victims, gender-harassed women showed significant decrements in professional and psychological well-being. These findings underscore the seriousness of gender harassment, which merits greater attention by both law and social science.

United States law recognizes the illegality of sex/gender stereotyping when it drives formal discrimination in employment, as in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins (1989). In the present study, we investigated whether such stereotyping—and attendant intolerance for counterstereotypicality—also breeds discrimination in the form of gender harassment. That is, we examined whether and how different components of gender counterstereotypicality combined to affect women’s risk of being targeted with harassment. Using a sample of 425 working women, we tested how deviations from stereotypical femininity—masculine appearance, masculine-typed behaviors (aggression and self-reliance), and work in a masculine context—related to women’s experiences of gender harassment (specifically, sexist remarks and gender policing). We found that women were caught in a “catch-22:” Professional success in many highly compensated fields requires stereotypically masculine behavior and appearance, but those same attributes increased women’s harassment risk. Taken together, our findings carry methodological, practical, and legal implications. If working women are penalized for their gender deviance through different forms of gender harassment, particularly in certain work domains, this may fuel gender discrepancies in particular fields. There could be a cumulative impact on women throughout their careers, from hiring to evaluation to advancement up the ranks. Methodologically, this study can expand our understandings of how to operationalize gender role violation and parse apart different manifestations of workplace harassment. It can also inform debates about relationships between sex stereotyping, harassment, and the law.

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The delayed uptake of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine offers an opportunity to explore how temporality and risk are at work in everyday life. Drawing from a mixed-methods study with parents ( N = 50) in Northern California, this study explored parents' decision to delay HPV vaccination for their children among parents who had not yet vaccinated ( n = 27). At the core of these decisions were temporal assessments of risk whereby parents weighed their child's (perceived) present risk of HPV exposure against the uncertain perceived risks of the vaccine itself. Our findings are promising as they indicate that given time, and the continued growth of evidence regarding the safety and effectiveness of HPV vaccination, completion rates should increase. However, our results also suggest that vaccination delays are not merely a matter of scientific doubt but also based on parents' (potentially inaccurate) perceptions of their child's sexual readiness, and thus potentially more difficult to overcome.