Exposure to Sexism Impairs Women’s Writing Skills Even Before Their Evaluation

Abstract

In two experimental vignette studies, we examined the relationship between exposure to a sexist message and women's writing skills in the context of a simulated job selection interview. In Study 1, under experimental conditions, 85 Italian women ( M age = 26.99, SD = 10.62) were exposed to a benevolent sexist message, a hostile sexist message, or a neutral message, and evaluated the sexism of the job selection interview they were involved in. Then, before performing the problem-solving task that would allegedly be used in the selection process, we measured the perceived sexism of the scenario by asking them to write a short text-not connected with the subsequent evaluation-in which they had to describe this experience to a close friend. Results showed that exposure to a hostile or to a benevolent sexist message impaired women's writing skills, through the mediation of the perception of sexism of the message. These results have been found by serendipity. In Study 2 ( N = 114, M age = 26.99, SD = 10.62), performed using the same experimental procedure, but adopting more convincing variables and stronger data analyses, we confirmed the results of Study 1. The strengths, limitations, and possible developments of the research are discussed.

A systematic review of the ambivalent sexism literature: Hostile sexism protects men’s power; benevolent sexism guards traditional gender roles.

“…Only scant and mixed evidence suggests a role of HS in work-related performance and success for women, with one article reporting a positive association (Smith-Castro et al, 2019; see also Cheng et al, 2020), two reporting a negative association (Kuchynka, Salomon, et al, 2018) and effect (Bradley-Geist et al, 2015), and one reporting negative effects for both BS and HS (Grilli et al, 2020). Of particular interest is one article finding that women low on HS (when controlling for BS) persisted more on a stereotype-relevant task (i.e., spatial intelligence test) following exposure to pictures of men and women in counterstereotypical gender roles (de Lemus et al, 2015).…”

“…Beyond performance outcomes per se, some articles assessed feelings and experiences of participants during task performance using self-reports (e.g., self-efficacy; Jones et al, 2014) or physiological measures (e.g., brain activity; Dardenne et al, 2013; cardiovascular response; Lamarche et al, 2020; Salomon et al, 2015), and task-related helping behaviors (Shnabel et al, 2016). Experiments here usually used common ASI manipulations (e.g., Barreto et al, 2010; Shnabel et al, 2016) or task-specific manipulations that conveyed ambivalent sexist (HS or BS) messages in the instructions (e.g., Dardenne et al, 2013; Grilli et al, 2020) or confederates’ comments (e.g., Bradley-Geist et al, 2015; Lamarche et al, 2020). The evidence for outcomes associated with work-related interests, aspirations, and performance mostly yielded patterns of findings that are consistent with negative effects that are unique to BS (roles) rather than HS (rank), mostly among women .…”