We retested core ambivalent sexism theory tenets and explored novel correlations with national outcomes in 62 nations. Replicating Glick et al., cross-national analyses supported (a) hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS) as cross-culturally recognizable, complementary ideologies associated with gender inequality; (b) women appearing to be influenced by, but also resisting men’s HS and embracing BS to counter men’s HS (outscoring men in some highly sexist nations). Novel cross-national comparisons showed (a) men’s HS and both genders’ BS correlated with fewer women in paid work, whereas only BS correlated with domestic labor inequity, (b) both HS and BS correlated with accepting intimate partner violence toward women. Finally, HS and BS correlated with generally dysfunctional national outcomes: antidemocratic tendencies, less productivity, more collective violence, and lower healthy lifespan for both genders. Results reinforce that BS harms women and suggest men also have a stake in reducing sexist ideologies.
The cultural moderation of gender stereotypes hypothesis argues that societies assign the most culturally valued traits to men, the dominant group. Thus, in line with cultural ideals, collectivistic societies should assign men more communality, whereas individualistic societies should assign men more individualism. Using archival data, Cuddy et al. found evidence for cultural moderation in descriptive stereotypes. We argue, however, that cultural moderation should be tested using prescriptive stereotypes, which more directly reflect cultural ideals about how men and women should be. We also provide a more robust test using contemporary data from 62 countries from the Towards Gender Harmony project (N = 27,391), allowing multilevel modeling techniques. We found evidence for cultural moderation for communal (though not agentic) traits: Collectivistic (compared to individualistic) nations prescribed relatively more communal traits to men. Thus, we show that prescriptions for men gravitate more toward core cultural values than prescriptions for women.
We examined the content of and reactions to stereotypical comments about men and women. In Study 1, daily comments participants recalled hearing people make about "what men/women are like" were generally negative and targeted the other gender. Men rejected negative comments about both genders, whereas women rejected negative comments about women more than comments about men. In Study 2, college participants could confront an online interaction partner who made an other-gender sexist comment. Women confronted a comment targeting women and had more negative reactions to sexism directed at a woman than at a man; men had equivalent, negative reactions to sexism that did not depend on target gender. Study 3 extended and replicated Study 2 by including both other-gender and same gender sexism. Results showed that (a) women were more attuned to men's sexism toward women compared to all other types and (b) men responded negatively to sexism about either gender, but were more likely to confront sexism directed at women than sexism directed at men. We suggest that women's tendency to confront sexism when it targets women but not men may reinforce stereotypes that undermine gender equality.
We propose that a key reason why the workplace gender revolution has stalled (England, 201010) is that work remains the site of masculinity contests among men. In this chapter, we outline a theoretical framework for thinking about work as a masculinity contest, beginning with a brief review of scholarship on masculinity and exploring how the workplace is a context in which men feel particular pressure to prove themselves as "real men". We identify different dimensions of masculinity along which employees may compete and how this competition may differ by work context. We propose that organizations with Masculinity Contest Cultures (MCCs) represent dysfunctional organizational climates (e.g. rife with toxic leadership, bullying and harassment) that are associated with poor individual outcomes for men as well as women (e.g. burnout, low organizational dedication, lower well-being). We review initial research into MCCs and end with a discussion of the contributions made by conceptualizing work as a masculinity contest and directions for future research.
This symposium seeks to understand the experience of working fathers – from opportunities and constraints to support and stereotypes. The default for many working fathers is to fulfill the “ideal worker”—fully devoted to and available for the job, with no personal responsibilities or interests that interfere with this commitment to work – in their organizations and a “bread winner” – the sole or primary financial provider in their families. However, many working men also want to be engaged fathers. Given the competing pulls between roles at home and in organizations, many men are left feeling, as Erin Reid (2015) wrote: “over-worked and under-familied.” Diving into the research on working fathers at this point in time is an opportune moment for scholars to support working fathers fulfilling their professional and caregiving ambitions, which can benefit them, their organizations and their families.
This inaugural article considers two types of challenges – scientific and cultural – facing researchers who study gender, sexualities, and relationships. For the scientific challenges, I focus on the tension between constructing parsimonious theories while simultaneously accounting for the complexity of gender, sexuality, and relationships. I focus on ambivalent sexism theory as an example that illustrates both the advantages and disadvantages of parsimonious theories before turning to a topic for which achieving parsimony has been elusive: gender identity. Finally, I address the current, highly politicized cultural environment, addressing attempts to suppress gender and sexual diversity, as well as to silence teaching and research on these topics.
The reproducibility movement in psychology has resulted in numerous highly publicized instances of replication failures. The goal of the present work was to investigate people’s reactions to a psychology replication failure vs. success, and to test whether a failure elicits harsher reactions when the researcher is a woman vs. a man. We examined these questions in a pre-registered experiment with a working adult sample, a conceptual replication of that experiment with a student sample, and an analysis of data compiled and posted by a psychology researcher on their public weblog with the stated goal to improve research replicability by rank-ordering psychology researchers by their “estimated false discovery risk.” Participants in the experiments were randomly assigned to read a news article describing a successful vs. failed replication attempt of original work from a male vs. female psychological scientist, and then completed measures of researcher competence, likability, integrity, perceptions of the research, and behavioral intentions for future interactions with the researcher. In both working adult and student samples, analyses consistently yielded large main effects of replication outcome, but no interaction with researcher gender. Likewise, the coding of weblog data posted in July 2021 indicated that 66.3% of the researchers scrutinized were men and 33.8% were women, and their rank-ordering was not correlated with researcher gender. The lack of support for our pre-registered gender-replication hypothesis is, at first glance, encouraging for women researchers’ careers; however, the substantial effect sizes we observed for replication outcome underscore the tremendous negative impact the reproducibility movement can have on psychologists’ careers. We discuss the implications of such negative perceptions and the possible downstream consequences for women in the field that are essential for future study.
We proposed that the Prescriptive Beauty Norm (PBN), the injunctive demand for women to intensively pursue beauty, reflects motives to maintain gender hierarchy and translates into employment discrimination. In Studies 1a and 1b, the PBN (distinct from other "beauty myth" [Wolf, 1990] components; namely, bodily and grooming standards, and attainability beliefs) uniquely correlated with hierarchy-supporting values and ideologies. In Study 2, experimentally threatening (vs. affirming) gender hierarchy increased PBN endorsement among sexist (but not nonsexist) participants, an effect mediated by power values. In Studies 3 and 4, participants who scored high (vs. low) in sexism (Study 3) and social dominance orientation (Study 4) enforced higher appearance requirements for women in powerful (vs. entry-level), masculine professions. This "beauty tax" targeted women more than men (Study 3) and was mediated by PBN endorsement (Study 4). Illustrating real-life implications, in an organizational setting (Study 5), sexism predicted penalizing "insufficiently groomed" female candidates more for high-power (vs. low-power) jobs. Finally, supporting the hypothesis that the PBN represents a contemporary, subtle replacement for traditional hierarchy-maintaining ideologies that have lost their influence in modern secular society, Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) correlated with PBN endorsement among secular more than among religious respondents (Study 6), whose "ideological arsenal" contains more straightforward means to police women. We discuss practical implications for gender equality, as well as theoretical implications for reconciling evolutionary and feminist perspectives on beauty norms.
Data from Reuters/Ipsos polls (6116 respondents) conducted shortly before and after the 2016 presidential election (from 4 to 17 November 2016) were used to test whether: (1) women and men differed in favorability toward Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, (2) sexism (either hostile or benevolent) predicted favorability ratings toward each candidate. Overall, men and women rated Clinton similarly, but men favored Trump significantly more than women did. Hostile sexist attitudes were second only to general political orientation in predicting positive attitudes toward Trump; however, hostile sexism predicted disfavoring Clinton only among women and not among men. By contrast, benevolent sexism weakly, but significantly predicted greater favorability toward Clinton but was unrelated to Trump favorability ratings. Thus, hostile sexist attitudes among voters significantly helped Trump, whereas benevolent sexism yielded only a weak protective effect toward Clinton.
Reports an error in "A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition" by Susan T. Fiske, Amy J. C. Cuddy, Peter Glick and Jun Xu (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002[Jun], Vol 82[6], 878-902). In the fourth paragraph of the Status Predicts Competence, and Competition Predicts Warmth section, the results are worded in a confusing way, and some values are wrong. In the fourth paragraph's first sentence, all correlation coefficients mistakenly omitted the negative sign implied in the text ("negatively correlated") and shown in the correct values reported in Table 6. The text should appear instead as follows: Perceived competition negatively correlated with perceived warmth for the student sample, group-level r(21) .68, p < .001; individual-level r(71) .22, p < .1, and the nonstudent sample, group-level r(21) .53, p < .001; individual-level r(36) .11, ns. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2002-02942-002.) Stereotype research emphasizes systematic processes over seemingly arbitrary contents, but content also may prove systematic. On the basis of stereotypes' intergroup functions, the stereotype content model hypothesizes that (1) 2 primary dimensions are competence and warmth, (2) frequent mixed clusters combine high warmth with low competence (paternalistic) or high competence with low warmth (envious), and (3) distinct emotions (pity, envy, admiration, contempt) differentiate the 4 competence-warmth combinations. Stereotypically, (4) status predicts high competence, and competition predicts low warmth. Nine varied samples rated gender, ethnicity, race, class, age, and disability out-groups. Contrary to antipathy models, 2 dimensions mattered, and many stereotypes were mixed, either pitying (low competence, high warmth subordinates) or envying (high competence, low warmth competitors). Stereotypically, status predicted competence, and competition predicted low warmth. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
........................................................................... 4 INTRODCUTION..................................................................... 5 LITERATURE REVIEW............................................................. 7 METHOD.............................................................................. 18 RESULTS.............................................................................. 22 DISCUSSION.......................................................................... 26 LIMITATIONS........................................................................ 30 IMPLICATIONS...................................................................... 32 CONCLUSION......................................................................... 34 REFERENCES.......................................................................... 35 APPENDIX.............................................................................. 40 TABLES AND FIGURES.............................................................50 POP CULTURE AND PERCEPTIONS OF WOMEN 3 Table of
We propose that a key reason why the workplace gender revolution has stalled (England, 2010) is that work remains the site of masculinity contests among men. In this article, we outline a theoretical framework for thinking about work as a masculinity contest, beginning with a brief review of scholarship on masculinity and exploring how the workplace is a context in which men feel particular pressure to prove themselves as real men. We identify different dimensions of masculinity along which employees may compete and how the competition may differ by work context. We propose that organizations with Masculinity Contest Cultures (MCCs) represent dysfunctional organizational climates (e.g., rife with toxic leadership, bullying, harassment) associated with poor individual outcomes for men as well as women (e.g., burnout, low organizational dedication, lower well-being).We discuss how papers in this special issue contribute insight into MCCs and end with a discussion of the contributions made by conceptualizing work as a masculinity contest, and directions for future research.
We developed and validated a 20-item Masculinity Contest Culture (MCC) scale as a workplace culture assessment. Participants indicated agreement or disagreement with workplace norm statements beginning with a common stem (In my work environment...). Exploratory (Study 1) and confirmatory (Study 2) factor analyses yielded four MCC subfactors: Show No Weakness, Strength and Stamina, Put Work First, and Dog Eat Dog. CFA and reliability analyses supported a second-order factor (with four subfactors), consistent with an overarching (though multifaceted) masculinity contest construct. Across two studies in which individuals rated their work environments, the MCC correlated with: (a) negative organizational dynamics (e.g., poor culture and toxic leadership), (b) dominative coworker behaviors (e.g., bullying and harassment), (d) negative individual work attitudes (e.g., burnout, turnover intentions), and (e) poor personal well-being. Results were generally consistent across studies and participant sex, suggesting that masculinity contest norms harm organizations and the men and women within them.
The Madonna-Whore Dichotomy (MWD) denotes polarized perceptions of women in general as either “good,” chaste, and pure Madonnas or as “bad,” promiscuous, and seductive whores. Whereas prior theories focused on unresolved sexual complexes or evolved psychological tendencies, feminist theory suggests the MWD stems from a desire to reinforce patriarchy. Surveying 108 heterosexual Israeli men revealed a positive association between MWD endorsement and patriarchy-enhancing ideology as assessed by Social Dominance Orientation (preference for hierarchical social structures), Gender-Specific System Justification (desire to maintain the existing gender system), and sexist attitudes (Benevolent and Hostile Sexism, Sexual Objectification of Women, and Sexual Double Standards). In addition, MWD endorsement negatively predicted men’s romantic relationship satisfaction. These findings support the feminist notion that patriarchal arrangements have negative implications for the well-being of men as well as women. Specifically, the MWD not only links to attitudes that restrict women’s autonomy, but also impairs men’s most intimate relationships with women. Increased awareness of motives underlying the MWD and its psychological costs can help practice professionals (e.g., couple therapists), as well as the general public, to foster more satisfying heterosexual relationships.