Implicit Romantic Fantasies and Women's Interest in Personal Power: A Glass Slipper Effect?

Abstract

Three experiments investigated the relationship between women's romantic fantasies and their interest in personal power. Romantic fantasies (associating partners with chivalry and heroism) were assessed using the Implicit Association Test and self-reports. In each experiment, women's implicit romantic fantasies were dissociated with their conscious beliefs. More important, implicit (but not explicit) romantic fantasies negatively predicted women's interest in personal power, including projected income, education goal, interest in high-status jobs, and group leadership appeal. By contrast, men's implicit romantic fantasies were not routinely linked to their interest in personal power. In concert, the findings are consistent with positing a "glass slipper" effect for women that may be an implicit barrier to gender equity.

Be Too Kind to a Woman, She’ll Feel Incompetent: Benevolent Sexism Shifts Self-construal and Autobiographical Memories Toward Incompetence

“…Clearly, benevolent statements elicited some negative ideas about women, who were suggested to be relatively incompetent. Shifting self-construal along such ideas and internalizing incompetence certainly contributes to women accepting and/or legitimizing their (personal) subordinated status (Haines and Jost 2000;Rudman and Heppen 2003). On one hand, performing badly certainly contributes to the prevailing feeling that their subordinate position and gender inequality are legitimate.…”

A portable version of the go/no-go association task (GNAT)

“…The IAT (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) is the most popular of the RT measures of implicit social cognition and has been used to assess numerous psychological phenomena including prejudice (Greenwald et al, 1998), sexism (Rudman & Kilianski, 2000), romantic fantasies (Rudman & Heppen, 2003), spider phobia (de Jong, van den Hout, Rietbroek, & Huijding, 2003), weight identity (Grover, Keel, & Mitchell, 2003), and self-esteem (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). Dabbs et al (2003) previously described a PDA version of the IAT that would allow researchers to measure implicit social cognition in field settings.…”

Sistematični pregled literature s področja ambivalentnega seksizma

“…L. Rudman in J. Heppen (2003) opozarjata, da romantični ideali predpostavljajo odvisnost žensk od moških. Pričakovanje ekonomskih in družbenih nagrad v primeru prevzemanja tradicionalnih spolnih vlog bi lahko vplivalo na to, da bi ženske, ki sprejemajo romantične in dobronamerne ideologije, iskale svojo izpolnitev direktno skozi odnose z moškimi in ne skozi lastno ekonomsko neodvisnost.…”