Navigating Nuance: Perceptions of Sexual Harassment in California’s Diverse Workplaces
At The Law Office of Scott R. Herndon, we understand that the pursuit of justice for sexual harassment survivors is intricately tied to societal perceptions and systemic biases. This webpage explores critical research on how job roles and gender norms profoundly influence how incidents of sexual harassment are understood—or misunderstood—in various professional landscapes across California. From the renowned wineries of Napa to the creative studios of Hollywood, and the innovative tech campuses of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the context of the workplace can dramatically shape the perception of employee’s experiences of sexual harassment. Our Berkeley-based firm, led by PhD trial lawyer Scott Herndon, is committed to dissecting these complex dynamics, ensuring that every survivor’s story is heard, validated, and vigorously represented, regardless of their job.
The purpose of this webpage is to explore perceptions of sexual harassment in the service industry (such as restaurants and wineries in Napa), the arts (the casting couch or music studio in Hollywood), or in corporations (tech companies in San Francisco or Silicon Valley). Our discussion will draw upon a recent article in Behavioral Sciences (2025) by Carolyne Halfon, Destiny McCray, and Danica Kulibert, entitled “Do People Judge Sexual Harassment Differently Based on the Type of Job a Victim Has?” (For ease of reading, we will refer to these researchers together as “Halfon.”)
Halfon’s research is provocative and important for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of sexual harassment litigation, where the intuitions of strangers (whether opposing counsel, insurance carriers, mediators, or juries and judges) are central in determining liability (fault), and damages (how much money it will take to justly compensate the victim).
This work should be essential reading for trial lawyers and survivors alike, as it draws attention to the way our assumptions can influence our judgment about the facts and importance of a case. If philosophy teaches us to question these assumptions, it will also help us to teach others about the complexity of the trauma of sexual assault and harassment in the workplace.
How do gender norms and workplace norms work together in the dysfunction of sexual harassment?
A gender norm is a set of social expectations and rules that governs what ordinary people call the appropriate behavior of a given gender. Gender norms play a critical role in shaping stereotypes in the workplace, and for determining if behavior does or does not constitute sexual harassment. In this regard, Glick (2004) and Lei (2022) both report that women are more likely to be viewed as weak or passive, and men more likely to be seen as dominant or assertive. Similar findings have led to the claim that women who conform to certain gender norms “are more readily perceived as prototypical women and prototypical victims of harassment (Halfon et al 2024; Kaiser et al 2022; Lei et al 2022).
How do we understand the experiences of people who fall outside common gender norms?
What happens when women (or individuals of any gender) diverge from our gender norms? For Halfon (2025) and a host of recent researchers:
Those who deviate from these gender norms…are less likely to fit the prototypical woman or prototypical victim of sexual harassment, and their experiences may be minimized.
This is a legitimate worry. If social expectations about appropriate behavior in the workplace can drive how we interpret a person’s experiences at work, we may wind up assigning importance to “normal” sets of circumstances, and undermining others too quickly, simply because we have not been asked to pay attention to the ways different people experience harassment. This can cause us to fail to recognize sexual harassment in some cases, or undermine our ability to understand the severity of an incident or the credibility of a survivor (Halfon et al 2025; Kaiser et al 2022).
Yet, Halfon’s study reveals something more complex at work. In her study of 427 participants, she found that “being a prototypical woman does not seem to impact how people perceive gender harassment.” Instead, Halfon’s research suggests that individualized gender norms should be understood as feeding into broader dynamics of workplace norms.
A workplace norm is a set of assumptions about permissible behavior in the job environment. These norms can be different across career paths. For instance, the workplace norms of a male-dominated job environment, such as a construction company or NFL locker room, will likely be different than the gender-diverse departments of universities or primary schools. This means that the trial attorney must pay as much attention to the victim’s pre-harassment identity as the specific identity of the job environment in which she worked. Both can play important roles in shaping perceptions of sexual harassment.
The Importance of Job Roles
Halfon beautifully describes the interpretive dynamic set forth by shared assumptions about the workplace and gender, and, by extension, its call to action in sexual harassment litigation. Halfon writes:
Job roles also evoke societal assumptions about gendered behaviors and affect judgments about whether a women’s experiences are consistent with cultural understandings of victimhood (Cite). Research by Glick and Fiske (1996) supports the idea that women in more feminine roles are often viewed through the lens of benevolent sexism, where they are seen as more fragile or deserving of protection. In contrast, women in masculine roles might be subjected to hostile sexism, where they are judged harshly for stepping outside traditional gender norms and gender roles. Understanding how occupational context influences perceptions of sexual harassment is essential for developing effective workplace policies. . . By promoting awareness of gender norm-based biases, research can help ensure all sexual harassment claims are taken seriously, regardless of the victim’s job or gender (Cite).
Do different jobs result in different perceptions of appropriate workplace behavior? Farrugia’s Work on Service Labor
Survivors of sexual assault and harassment face unique challenges based on their specific job, career path, and experience. This claim was recently explored by David Farrugia in his paper, “Sexual Harassment and Service Labor: Strategies and Relational Practices” (Gender, Work & Organization, 2025).
Generally, service labor refers to customer-facing work at restaurants, wineries, bars, nightclubs, sales meetings, corporate events, conferences, and reception desks, to name only a few familiar examples. In the context of understanding perceptions of sexual harassment, the dynamics of service labor have much to teach us about how workplace norms can function to shape our understanding of the nature and severity of an employee’s experience. In particular, service labor is described as customer-facing work that “requires workers to be open to interactions and have a sunny and receptive disposition (Farrugia 2025; Good and Cooper 2016).
Citing several scholars, Farrugia writes:
Notions of “good service” are constructed through gendered assumptions about feminine subservience and receptivity (Cite). Women are enrolled into the service labor force on the assumption that they will appear sexually available and are frequently treated as such by both customers and co-workers in positions of power (Cite).
Individuals in service occupations are often faced with unwanted touching, sexual innuendos, propositions, and implied, threatened, and actual sexual harassment and assault (Farrugia 2025; Hall 1993; Adkins 1995; Coffey et all 2018; Aborisade 2022; Guerrier and Adib 2000). Jobs like bartenders, hostesses, and some sales positions are expected to appear as implicitly sexually available, and asked to facilitate pleasurable, interactive experiences that foster commerce (Coffee 2018; Coffee et all 2023). As a result, the burden of managing these work environments, and bearing the weight of harassing consumer cultures, often falls on the female employee, unless the employer follows venue management policies or supportive employee cohorts that empower female workers to call out harassment and effectively eliminate it from the workplace in real time (See generally, Coffee 2018).
This is what Farrugia calls a “relational context”, where employees supporting one another to avoid intensified forms of sexual harassment in the workplace.
Unfortunately, protecting or “backing-up” co-workers almost always requires formal support from managers and owners. It also means that the workplace is free from internal harassment amongst co-workers. Finally, such support often takes place in spite of management, which may be disinterested or even themselves perpetrators of sexual harassment (Farrugia 2025).
The bottom line is that whether or not one’s co-workers strive to protect their fellow employees from sexual harassment in the workplace, this important, supportive work does not mean that sexual harassment has not taken place, or exacted a toll on the female workers who have labored through it. It only means one’s co-workers have stepped in to stop the harassment that has already taken place.
How can we reshape workplace ethics?
An effective lawyer should be able to reconstruct he dynamics of a given workplace and explain how sexual harassment may have been structurally created and even encouraged to foster profit in the service industry (Kocanci et all 2025). This work includes describing the net burden of working in such environments, and detailing how such harassment fits within relevant laws prohibiting it in the workplace.
The lesson for employees is simple, and well described by Mustafa Kocanci et all in their recent study, “The Dark Side of Aesthetic Labor: Ethics and the Atmosphere of Sexual Harassment” (Sage 2025). Kocanci writes:
[E]mployment relationships should adhere to certain ethical standards. Employment relationships must be grounded in ethical principles in order to safeguard the dignity, rights, and well-being of workers…[T]he asymmetrical bargaining power between employees and employers often results in exploitation, discrimination, and breaches of confidentiality (Cite). In particular, the normalization of harassment as “part of the job” in some sectors and the perception among employees that they are insufficiently protected hinder reporting of such incidents, creating a cycle of silence…
It is our common job and goal to empower all employees to work in environments that do not compromise their autonomy, dignity, and human rights—even if this means focusing a bright light on the gender and workplace norms that are sometimes taken for granted, and implicitly accepted in our consumer culture.
Only the best and most diligent law firms do this work. It is labor intensive, studied, and empathetic to the complexities of clients and their workplaces. But it is the kind of work that PhD trial lawyer Scott Herndon and The Law Office of Scott R. Herndon are proud to do with every case.
Expert Legal Advocacy for Sexual Harassment Survivors Across California
Understanding how deeply gender and workplace norms shape perceptions of sexual harassment is paramount to effective advocacy. At The Law Office of Scott R. Herndon, we leverage these critical insights from psychology and sociology to vigorously represent survivors throughout California, whether their experiences occurred in a Napa winery, a Hollywood studio, or a Silicon Valley tech firm. PhD trial lawyer Scott Herndon’s approach delves beyond superficial narratives, reconstructing the dynamics of your specific work environment to expose how sexual harassment may have been structurally encouraged or minimized. If you or someone you know has experienced workplace harassment, know that our firm is dedicated to empowering employees, upholding ethical standards, and fighting for your autonomy, dignity, and human rights against systemic pressures and implicit biases. Contact us today for a confidential consultation.
