Implicit Attitudes Towards Feminism

Abstract

This study employed the Implicit Association Test to assess implicit attitudes towards feminism among 68 U.S. undergraduates. On some trials, participants matched either good or bad words with a feminist or a traditionalist target person. On other trials, they matched feminine or masculine traits with these targets. We predicted (1) faster reaction times to feminist-bad pairings than to feminist-good pairings, (2) faster reactions to traditionalist-good pairings than to traditionalist-bad pairings, (3) faster reactions to traditionalist-feminine pairings than to traditionalist-masculine pairings, and (4) faster reactions to feminist-masculine pairings than to feminist-feminine pairings. The results supported the first three predictions. These results suggest an implicit negativity bias and masculinity bias towards feminists and an implicit positivity bias and femininity bias towards traditionalists.

Perceptions of feminist beliefs influence ratings of warmth and competence

“…This is also confirmed in the fifth study that found that women with strong feminist beliefs are seen as more competent than women with weak feminist beliefs. Hence, this research shows that in addition to the negative evaluations of the feminist stereotype (e.g., Houvouras & Carter, 2008; Jenen, Winquist, Arkkelin, & Schuster, 2009; Rudman & Fairchild, 2007), the feminist label might cue strong gender-equality beliefs that in turn are related to differences in evaluations. Our findings are further corroborated by recent findings that both self-labeled feminists and women who actively engage in feminist behavior (e.g., confront sexism at work) are evaluated more negatively than women who do not (Anastosopoulos & Desmarais, 2015).…”

“…In this paper we made the assumption that participants understood who feminists are regardless of their definition of feminism. One may consider this a limitation of the research, as some participants might have conflated feminist with being a woman (Houvouras & Carter, 2008), being an activist (Houvouras & Carter, 2008; Suter & Toller, 2006), or with negative stereotypes (Houvouras & Carter, 2008; Jenen et al, 2009; Robnett et al, 2012; Rudman & Fairchild, 2007). It could also be that because the egalitarian notion that men and women should be equals has become generally accepted and is now part of the mainstream culture (McCabe, 2005) and because it is generally believed that society is steadily drifting toward such equality, making it superfluous to push the issue of gender equality (Edley & Wetherell, 2001), identifying as a feminist is considered to be symptomatic of other, more radical beliefs (McCabe, 2005).…”

By name or by deed? Identifying the source of the feminist stigma

“…A review of four decades of American public opinion polls revealed that public support for both feminism and feminists has remained essentially unchanged since the early 1970s (Huddy et al, 2000). Though attitudes toward feminists range across studies from slightly negative to slightly positive (Breen & Karpinski, 2008;Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005;Jenen, Winquist, Arkkelin, & Schuster, 2008;Ramsey et al, 2007;Twenge & Zucker, 1999), only about one third of men and women report having a favorable impression of feminists (Huddy et al, 2000) and a sizable minority view the term "feminist" as an insult (Huddy et al, 2000;Schafer & Shaw, 2008). Generally, men think less favorably of feminists than do women (Breen & Karpinski, 2008;Henderson-King & Zhermer, 2003;Twenge & Zucker, 1999;Williams & Wittig, 1997) and feminists are evaluated less favorably than are women in general, housewives, and traditional women (Haddock & Zanna, 1994;MacDonald & Zanna, 1998;Twenge & Zucker, 1999).…”

Attributions of Blame to Battered Women when they are perceived as Feminists or as “Difficult to Deal With”

“…Even in the laboratory, the existence of a negative social perception of feminism has also been confirmed, even at an implicit level. For example, Jenen, Winquist, Arkkelin, and Schuster (2009) investigated implicit attitudes towards feminism using IAT (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998). Their participants showed lower reaction times for the feminismbad than for feminism-good association, faster responses for the traditionalism-good than for the traditionalism-bad association, and faster responses for traditionalism-female than for traditionalism-male association, which shows certain cognitive difficulty in relating feminism with good and traditional with bad.…”