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This research compares prejudice toward female politicians Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin through the lens of role congruity theory. We measured participants’ evaluations of stereotypicality, competence, warmth, and voting likelihood. Consistent with hypotheses, Clinton was evaluated as less stereotypically feminine and less warm than Palin, whereas Palin was evaluated as less competent than Clinton. Furthermore, participant gender, benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and political orientation predicted differential voting likelihood for Clinton and Palin. Implications for role congruity, ambivalent sexism, and female politicians are discussed.

This study examined whether relationship orientation was associated positively with confronting sexism and whether confronting sexism was associated positively with competence, self-esteem, and empowerment for women but not men in stereotypically masculine domains. Men and women undergraduates from a United States Midwestern university (n=165) were exposed to a sexist statement during a staged, online interaction. Relationship orientation, confronting (i.e., publically rating the sexist statement as problematic and inappropriate), competence, self-esteem, and empowerment were assessed. Consistent with hypotheses, relationship orientation was associated positively with confronting. Additionally, confronting was associated positively with competence, self-esteem, and empowerment for women but not men. Implications for interpersonal confrontation, relationship orientation, and gender differences in response to everyday sexism are discussed.

The present study used a workplace climate survey (N = 252) and semi-structured interviews (N = 12) to investigate faculty perceptions of, and experiences in, their STEM departments across four diverse institutions in order to understand barriers to women's success. We found that although men and women are equally productive, women report that their department perceives them as less productive than men. Similarly, women believe they have less influence on, and experience less collegiality in, their departments than men. Women also perceive more sexism and discrimination than men. These quantitative findings are supplemented with qualitative data to more fully understand faculty perspectives. In addition, we found that workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions are affected by the department climate for both men and women faculty members, which suggests that improving the climate serves all faculty members. Specific recommendations to improve STEM academic climates are discussed.

We applied the message‐learning theory of persuasion to examine perceptions of leaders who confront sexism. Participants (N = 283) read vignettes that varied the confrontation message (i.e., directness), source (i.e., confronter gender), and context (i.e., public vs. private). As hypothesized, female (vs. male) participants evaluated confronters more positively and female (vs. male) leaders were evaluated less favorably when they confronted publically. Additionally, participants perceived greater sexism for public (vs. private) confrontation contexts and were more surprised when the confrontation source was a male (vs. female) leader. Implications for confronting and persuasion theories and applications for policymakers are discussed.