The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.

Abstract

The authors present a theory of sexism formulated as ambivalence toward women and validate a corresponding measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). The ASI taps 2 positively correlated components of sexism that nevertheless represent opposite evaluative orientations toward women: sexist antipathy or Hostile Sexism (HS) and a subjectively positive ( for sexist men ) orientation toward women, Benevolent Sexism (BS). HS and BS are hypothesized to encompass 3 sources of male ambivalence: Paternalism, Gender Differentiation, and Heterosexuality. Six ASI studies on 2,250 respondents established convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Overall ASI scores predict ambivalent attitudes toward women, the HS scale correlates with negative attitudes toward and stereotypes about women, and the BS scale (for nonstudent men only) correlates with positive attitudes toward and stereotypes about women. A copy of the ASI is provided, with scoring instructions, as a tool for further explorations of sexist ambivalence."If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person Is sexism a form of prejudice? Although the question might appear absurd, consider Allport's (1954) influential definition of ethnic prejudice. Prejudice, Allport wrote, "is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization" (p. 9). The existence of prejudice is commonly indexed by measures of antipathy, such as social distance (e.g., Crosby, Bromley, & Saxe, 1980) and negative stereotypes (e.g., Sigall & Page, 1971 ). Relationships between men and women, however, do not easily fit the mold of ethnic prejudice, at the very least because no other two groups have been as intimately connected (S. T. Fiske & Stevens, 1993). Furthermore, cultural images of women from ancient to modern times are not uniformly negative; women have been revered as well as reviled (Eagly & Mladinic, 1993;Guttentag & Secord, 1983;Tavris & Wade, 1984 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peter Glick, Department of Psychology, Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin 54912-0599. Electronic mail may be sent via the Internet to peter.s.glick@lawrence.edu 491 indeed a prejudice, but in this article we argue that it is, and probably always has been, a special case of prejudice marked by a deep ambivalence, rather than a uniform antipathy,,toward women. Our goals are to: (a) reveal the multidimensional nature of sexism, (b) offer a theoretical and empirical analysis of the sources and nature of men's ambivalence toward women, (c) compare our conception of ambivalent sexism with other theories of ambivalence (including ambivalent racism), and (d) provide a validated measure of ambivalent sexism. Hostile and Benevolent SexismSexism has typically been conceptualized as a reflection of hostility toward women. This view neglects a significant aspect of sexism: the subjectively positive feelings toward women that often go hand in hand with sexist antipathy. We view sexism as a multidimensional construct that encom...

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