The authors argue that complementary hostile and benevolent components of sexism exist across cultures. Male dominance creates hostile sexism (HS), but men's dependence on women fosters benevolent sexism (BS)--subjectively positive attitudes that put women on a pedestal but reinforce their subordination. Research with 15,000 men and women in 19 nations showed that (a) HS and BS are coherent constructs that correlate positively across nations, but (b) HS predicts the ascription of negative and BS the ascription of positive traits to women, (c) relative to men, women are more likely to reject HS than BS, especially when overall levels of sexism in a culture are high, and (d) national averages on BS and HS predict gender inequality across nations. These results challenge prevailing notions of prejudice as an antipathy in that BS (an affectionate, patronizing ideology) reflects inequality and is a cross-culturally pervasive complement to HS.

A 16-nation study involving 8,360 participants revealed that hostile and benevolent attitudes toward men, assessed by the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory (P. Click & S.T. Fiske, 1999), were (a) reliably measured across cultures, (b) positively correlated (for men and women, within samples and across nations) with each other and with hostile and benevolent sexism toward women (Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, P. Click & S.T. Fiske, 1996), and (c) negatively correlated with gender equality in cross-national comparisons. Stereotype measures indicated that men were viewed as having less positively valenced but more powerful traits than women. The authors argue that hostile as well as benevolent attitudes toward men reflect and support gender inequality by characterizing men as being designed for dominance.

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Research on rater effects in language performance assessments has provided ample evidence for a considerable degree of variability among raters. Building on this research, I advance the hypothesis that experienced raters fall into types or classes that are clearly distinguishable from one another with respect to the importance they attach to scoring criteria. To examine the rater type hypothesis, I asked 64 raters actively involved in scoring examinee writing performance on a large-scale assessment instrument to indicate on a four-point scale how much importance they would attach to each of nine routinely used criteria. The criteria covered various performance aspects, such as fluency, completeness, and grammatical correctness. In a preliminary step, many-facet Rasch analysis revealed that raters differed significantly in their views on the importance of the various criteria. A two-mode clustering technique yielded a joint classification of raters and criteria, with six rater types emerging from the analysis. Each of these types was characterized by a distinct scoring profile, indicating that raters were far from dividing their attention evenly among the set of criteria. Moreover, rater background variables were shown to partially account for the scoring profile differences. The findings have implications for assessing the quality of large-scale rater-mediated language testing, rater monitoring, and rater training.