Women’s endorsement of sexist beliefs directed towards the self and towards other women...: Gender Campus

Women’s endorsement of sexist beliefs directed towards the self and towards other women in general

Abstract

Research on women’s endorsement of sexist beliefs has recently focused on the role of both internalization and subtyping (Becker, 2010), claiming that women reject hostile sexist statements more if they are directed towards the self than if they are directed towards subtypes of women (e.g. career women). In our study, we complement this idea of subtyping by showing, in a repeated measures design, that women also reject hostile sexist statements more if they are directed towards the self than if they are directed towards women in general. For benevolent sexism this difference did not occur. These results are interpreted in terms of system and ego justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994), which broadens previous claims on women’s endorsement of sexist beliefs.

In: Klea Faniko, Fabio Lorenzi-Cioldi, Oriane Sarrasin, Eric Mayor (eds.), Gender and Social Hierarchies. Perspectives from social psychology, New York, Routledge, 2016, chap. 11