While consciousness-raising is beneficial overall, it has several negative effects. After hearing how other women have been mistreated, women sometimes become hypersensitive, particularly because they do not necessarily know which person made which egregious statement that they have heard third-hand. Men, too, also can become unnecessarily inhibited in their actions with females, and being the victim of hypersensitivity could cause them to be suspicious of just complaints.
One consequence of increasing awareness of sexism is that women may then expect it and treat men with more suspicion. For example, at MIT, there were many cases of men misinterpreting women's friendliness as expressions of romantic interest [MIT 1983, page 14,]. While women should know that their behavior could be misinterpreted, such knowledge has negative effects as well:
Some women react by becoming wary of all new men they meet. Thus, some men are confronted with negative reactions from women to seemingly innocuous, friendly overtures [MIT 1983, page 4,].Men who have been overreacted to are likely to, on the basis of a misinterpreted event, treat women's complaints with skepticism.
This phenomenon is also illustrated by the following letter from a male computer science student:
First, let nothing I say leave you with the impression that I don't believe sexism or racism exists. However, I think that many incidents are incorrectly interpreted.Also, there have been cases where women have gotten upset at unwanted physical contact, such as being patted on the back by a man, before finding out that he treats both men and women in that manner. (Of course, there are many more cases where men only try to touch their female colleagues.)I am TAing the introduction to AI this semester. After I graded and returned the first assignment some woman and her boyfriend questioned me about the grading. Her grade was somewhat below his (about 5 out of 30 points I think). Her homework was one of the sloppiest ones in the class, and probably deserved a lower score but I had been instructed to grade generously for the first assignment. Among her arguments was something about how hard she had worked on it (there was no evidence of hard work). And something about how she and her boyfriend had done it together. Ignoring the possibility that this was cheating (cooperation was not allowed) I felt that there was some implication that she felt I was giving her a low grade because of her gender....
Since then I have talked to her several times. At first I think she may have worried that my grading was gender biased, but I don't think she now believes that.
By the way, I did a very rough check of my grading records some time ago. By sorting the class by average grade and eyeballing the result I think that about
of the women are in each of the top, middle, and bottom thirds of the class.
Because of consciousness of discrimination, sometimes people who are ``obnoxious to everyone'' get falsely accused of sexism or racism. For example,
`General' harassment often takes a specifically sexist form when applied to women.... Instead of saying to some average white male, `Your work on this project has been inexcusably sloppy, you blinking idiot; you'll never make it that way!', the remark may come out, `My God, you think no better than my wife; why don't you go home and have babies!' [Rowe 1990, page 159,]
Additionally, reports and anecdotes are filled with anonymous examples of sexist statements by male professors, staff, and students. After hearing such things, a female student has no idea which people around her hold such disturbing attitudes and is likely to distribute her distrust among the guilty and innocent alike.
After men are made aware that women are unhappy with receiving unwanted and improper attention from male colleagues, there is the risk that they will be hesitant to socialize with females. This phenomenon followed the distribution of the MIT report on discrimination [MIT 1983, page 19,]. Because informal interaction is an important part of the educational process, this represents a serious loss. For example, it is not uncommon for professors to have meals with their students. It would be a shame if they failed to invite their female students, out of fear of being misunderstood.
Hypersensitivity on both sides occasionally escalates an innocent incident into a colossal misunderstanding. When ``Jane'' was interviewed for a job by ``John'', she found the interview style strange. John spent almost all the time talking about the company and appeared uninterested in hearing Jane say anything about herself. Jane mentioned she thought this style odd. Later, she spoke to a friend ``Mark'' who had worked at the company and was friends with John. He said that John had said that Jane was suspicious at the interview and seemed to think that she was being interviewed purely for quotas --- i.e. that they were not interested in her qualifications. This idea had never crossed Jane's mind --- until that point. After Mark made some further statements about how the company's leaders were opposed to affirmative action, Jane decided it was likely that the reason she had not been asked many questions was because they did not want to hire a female. She felt confident of this conclusion when they offered a job to a male whom she considered to be of equal skill to herself. A few days later, however, they invited her for a plant visit and offered her a job. Thus, both John and Jane incorrectly leapt to conclusions.