There are gender differences in perceptions of sexual harassment, with women perceiving a broader range of behaviors as harassing than do men. It is possible that such variables as evaluator sex, actor sex and subject sex may have an effect to perception of sexual misconduct.

Reported study in which a sample (n=1589) of student women and student men indicated their perceptions of 12 scenarios describing examples of potential sexual harassment situations. In 8 of the 12 situations the actorʼs and subjectʼs sex was changed, generated an experimental design with 4 different combinations for each situation.

Findings indicate that the rank order of the evaluation of scenarios severity was very similar for both subgroups in the study and that there were few gender differences between student womenʼs and student menʼs perceptions of the individual scenarios. As it was hypothesized, most scenarios differed significantly in case of actor and subject sex - evaluators perceive the behavior as more serious and inappropriate when the perpetrator is a man than when the perpetrator is a woman. Only phone stalking and internet nude publishing did not differ statistically. The average score for male and female perpetrator differed significantly too.

There exists a remarkable agreement in rank order of evaluated situations but mostly woman identify behavior as sexually harassing (as it was expected). Menʼs norms are really milder than womenʼs norms. Most important conclusion - simply being a male is enough to be discriminated in evaluating their sexual behavior.