Since you're asking seriously, I have a hypothesis that probably applies to a lot of the well-meaning skeptical responses in this thread: Most of the men reply

Since you're asking seriously, I have a hypothesis that probably applies to a lot of the well-meaning skeptical responses in this thread: Most of the men replying in this thread have an incorrect "prior" (in the statistical sense) of the odds that a woman will experience serious sexual harassment in the workplace. This prior emerges, one presumes, because we look at ourselves as the model for estimating that behavior, think "there's no way in hell I'd behave that way, so this must be really rare", and assign a relatively low probability to the occurrence. That prior is incorrect. There are enough harassers out there, each of whom harms multiple people, that, in fact, the average experience is of having been inappropriately approached, harassed, or outright assaulted, to the point where [1] a woman has a lifetime 1 in 6 chance of being the victim of rape or attempted rape, and in one survey, 1 in 3 women reported having experienced workplace sexual harassment. [2] Those numbers may be wrong a bit in either direction, but the decimal point is probably in the right place. When we hear a claim like "X was sexually harassed by Y", we evaluate the likelihood of that statement in light of our own experience and prior - and assign to it a much lower likelihood of it being true than the true probability. In other words, you mentally calculate: P(harassed | X says harassed). By bayes rule, that's equal to P(X says harassed | harassed) * P(harassed) / P(X says harassed). So when our mental model of P(harassed) is too low, our estimate of P(harassed | X says harassed) is too low. And thus arises excessive disbelief in claims that are more likely to be true. So, my very geeky suggestion for this is: Be very precise about the question you're asking about and the assumptions that go into it. You can often find a way to validate those assumptions to check what you're asking about. [1] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/1-in-3-women-sexually-harassed-work-cosmopolitan_n_6713814.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/1-in-3-women-sexual...