Scientists say they’ve figured out the real reason men sexually harass in the workplace: fragile male egos.
According to a report published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles, the behavior that led to the massive #MeToo movement stems from powerful men worrying that they would be perceived as incompetent.
Women who participated in the study did not have this issue, researchers say.
“Men do not necessarily sexually harass women because they seek sexual gratification, but rather because their insecurity about being perceived as incompetent prompts them to want to undermine a woman’s position in the social hierarchy,” study co-author Kimberly Rios says in a press release.
The researchers conducted three experiments on the personality traits of powerful people for the report. For one of the experiments, they assigned different power levels to the 159 participants, both male and female, then had the participants choose to send either neutral or sexuality-related articles to a hypothetical female study participant.
Men whose personalities were prone to insecurity over their competence were more likely to send the sexual articles. Study authors add that those men didn’t receive sexual gratification from sending those articles, suggesting that their article section was purely a power play.
The authors say the studies can be helpful in preventing behavior like Harvey Weinstein’s. They believe that companies can be better at creating “organizational cultures that do not foster feelings of insecurity.”
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