The Influence of Race and Gender on Student Self Reports of Sexual Harrassment by College Professors

This was my first article I read and I was most excited to read about. I had heard of incidents of college professors witht heir students, saw these kind of related stories in movies and on television but had never seen any hard data whichw as supplied in this article.

The problem I had with this article was that I felt like the asnwers may not completely honest within the study. I thought of a movie we watched in Definition of Normality where children were coerced into their witness accounts. Friedman was being investigated for child molestation and many of the children's stories were differing, because of the police and community influence on their answers. In this article, I felt that the study was being forced into college students in a way that made them come with exaggerated answers and classifications of sexual harrassment. If someone kept asking and interviewing you about a topic, couldn't you concede and give an answer that they wanted?

I found the points about the men and women very intersting and agreed with the assessment that these answers may not completley accurate. SOme men may brush off instances, while others may lie and some women could exagerate or misremember some accounts. The study did its beast to find percentages of race and gender who have been harrassed by college professors, but it isn't foolproof.

The enxt part of the article that was very ifnroming spoke about the stereotypes associated with sexual harrassment. If someone is not only attacked about their sexuality, but their specific race related features, then their accounts may be misrepresented as well. The extremity of the situation could be doubled, just by having a racist comment be woven into a sexist one.

The last point I have about the article is closer to the end, but still seen throughout the body of the article. I felt that there were way too many numbers for such a objective study. A lot of opinion and bias goes into the answers for both men and women. There are so many factors, some which were represented int he article. I thought of the knicks sexual harrassment case where a women was awarded millions of dollars for claiming the organization was at fault and disgusting and a slum. If I remember correctly there was no hard evidence that Isiah Thomas, Stephon Marbury or the Knicks did anything wrong, yet they still settled to make the woman be quiet. The publicity was already bad enough and the token word "sexual" made this even more complicated. Sexual harrassment is no doubt a huge problem in our society, whether it is taken advantage of or a legit concern.