If My Professor Hits on Me

What happens to a student's academic interest and mental health when a professor hits on them? Recent research by Alexandra Laird and Emily Pronin, academics in psychology at Princeton University, explored these questions.

Specifically, they randomly assigned half of their male and female participants to imagine being hit on by their professor. They then asked these participants questions to assess their academic interests going forward in this situation, and their self-esteem.

They found that, regardless of the participant's gender, just imagining a professor hitting on them reduced their interest in the academic area of the professor, and their current self-esteem. For female participants, however, the effects were much stronger. The authors found that this was largely because female participants believed that the actions of the professor would raise doubts about their potential to succeed.

Whether this was due to structural concerns (people blocking you from success), or reduced belief in personal abilities is unclear. Regardless, it raises interesting questions about the impact of sexual advances (and sexualization more broadly) on women. Broadly, it is clear that women experience sexual advances, particularly by power figures, at least somewhat differently than men. Men don't always see these — at least in hypothetical situations — as an inherent obstacle to their own success or a signal of their own lack of ability. Given evidence that people tend to exaggerate how much other people share their own interests and experiences (see work on the false consensus effect), my guess is that most men do not fully appreciate this.

Also, it suggests quite strongly, as many feminist scholars have argued, that women's worth is more readily equated to their own physical appearance/sexuality, and that women internalize this (see work by Fredrickson and colleagues on Objectification Theory, for instance).

I also wonder how this relates to research on how sexual objectification impacts views of women. This work basically finds that women, when sexualized (depicted in swimwear or lingerie), tend to be perceived as less intelligent and capable than when they are not.

It could be then that women's beliefs about the sexual advances of their professor — how it would make them doubt their own abilities — is internalised as a consequence of actual beliefs people hold. That is, women might come to view themselves as less capable when made the target of sexual advances, because people tend to hold beliefs that women are less capable when they are sexualized.