Reject or Protect? Corrective Action in Response to Women’s vs. Men’s Reports of Workplace Abuse

Organizations encourage employees to report abusive behavior as such reports are believed to facilitate corrective action against transgressors. However, there are competing perspectives on whether reports made by women (versus men) will facilitate corrective action. On the one hand, a dominant stream of research suggests that reports made by women are often ignored and disregarded because women are not seen as credible. On the other hand, an emerging stream of research suggests that third parties will see reports made by women as serious and important. To reconcile these perspectives, we draw on aversive discrimination theory, which hints that the degree of corroboration about abuse plays a key role. That is, under situations of low corroboration, third parties are unlikely to take corrective action when women (versus men) make reports, but under situations of high corroboration, third parties are equally or even more likely to take corrective action when women (versus men) make reports. We additionally theorize and find that corroboration is particularly influential when the reporter’s general credibility is not established. Our empirical package includes six complementary studies: an archival data set of U.S. Government employees and five preregistered experiments. Funding: For financial assistance, we thank the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [Junior Faculty Development Award].