Damned if She Does: The Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis and Discrimination of Social Dominant Female Minority Members

Abstract

The Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis (SMTH) proposes that racism is a gendered form of discrimination based on an ethnicity-by-gender interaction: compared to female ethnic minority members, male ethnic minority members are more likely to be direct targets of racist discrimination. This study examined whether the SMTH, which originally refers to objective discrimination, would also apply to subjectively perceived discrimination in the form of active harm. Further, we proposed that Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) in female ethnic minority members would moderate the predictions of the SMTH. We tested our hypotheses using multiple linear regression analyses among a representative sample of New Zealand Europeans as the ethnic majority in New Zealand and Non-Europeans as the ethnic minority. As hypothesized, male non-Europeans reported more active harm than female non-Europeans. Unexpectedly, not only female, but also male, non-Europeans high in SDO reported more active harm than non-Europeans low in SDO. Therefore, applied to perceived discrimination, racist discrimination is based on an ethnicity-by-SDO interaction and not on an ethnicity-by-gender interaction. Together, these findings provide evidence that the SMTH cannot be unreservedly extended to perceived discrimination and that other processes may underlie these subjective experiences of discrimination that need to be considered in more detail.