What causes workplace sexual harassment? How can we continue to better understand it? And what can be done to prevent it?

Successful answers to questions like these need a good scientific explanation. But which explanation should we draw on?

Two very different explanations circulate among social scientists. In new research, we compared how the two stack up – and found one of them was a clear winner.

Evolved sexual tendencies or maintaining gender hierarchies?

On one view, sexual harassment – as the name implies – is all about sexuality. According to the evolutionary psychology research program, men and women have evolved different psychological mechanisms to solve the different challenges they faced to successfully reproduce back in the Pleistocene epoch.

For men, these adaptive mechanisms include a greater interest in casual sex, and a tendency to mistakenly conclude that women are sexually interested in them. Women, in contrast, evolved to be more sensitive to potential threats to their sexual autonomy – and therefore perceive men’s advances as harassing.

But for social science scholars informed by the gender hierarchy – the idea that men hold more power and status than women – sexual harassment is “an expression of workplace sexism, not sexuality or sexual desire”. It is a mechanism for preserving work roles as masculine terrain, and pushing back against threats to men’s higher status within a workplace.

These two accounts offer very........

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