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Bystander intervention is a powerful response to sexual harassment that reduces victims’ burden to respond. However, gender prototypes depicting sexual harassment victims as prototypical women (i.e., stereotypically feminine) may hinder intervention when harassment targets women who deviate from this prototype. Across four preregistered experiments (N= 1,270 Americans), we test whether bystanders intervene less readily in nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) women’s sexual harassment. Participants observed a man manager ask a series of increasingly sexually harassing job interview questions toward either a gender prototypical or nonprototypical woman by traits (Studies 1–3) or gender identity (Study 4). Participants were instructed to intervene to stop the interview if/when they judged the questions as inappropriate. A meta-analysis revealed participants had a greater threshold for intervention when harassment targeted a nonprototypical (vs. prototypical) woman—a small but meaningful effect. Efforts to foster bystander intervention in sexual harassment would benefit by recognizing this neglect of nonprototypical women. 

We provide a model describing how the narrow prototype of women as having conventionally feminine attributes and identities serves as a barrier to perceiving sexual harassment and appropriately responding to sexual-harassment claims when the victims of harassment do not resemble this prototype. We review research documenting that this narrow prototype of women overlaps with mental representations of sexual-harassment targets. The prototype of women harms women who diverge from this prototype: Their experiences with sexual harassment are less likely to be perceived as such, and they experience more negative interpersonal, organizational, and legal consequences when they experience harassment. Perceptions of sexual harassment are the catalyst by which sexual harassment is recognized and remedied. Thus, narrow gender prototypes may impede the promise and potential of civil rights laws and antiharassment policy.