Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men?

Four experiments confirmed that women's automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men's and investigated explanations for this sex difference, derived from potential sources of implicit attitudes (L. A. Rudman, 2004). In Experiment 1, only women (not men) showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem (A. G. Greenwald et al., 2002), revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference. Experiments 2 and 3 found pro-female bias to the extent that participants automatically favored their mothers over their fathers or associated male gender with violence, suggesting that maternal bonding and male intimidation influence gender attitudes. Experiment 4 showed that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women. In concert, the findings help to explain sex differences in automatic in-group bias and underscore the uniqueness of gender for intergroup relations theorists.     

Accuracy and Bias in Stereotypes about the Social and Political Attitudes of Women and Men

In three experiments examining the accuracy of gender stereotypes about attitudes, male and female participants estimated the attitudes of men or women on items that had been administered in the General Social Survey to assess attitudes on social and political issues. Demonstrating moderate stereotypic accuracy were correlations between (a) participants' estimates of these attitudes and (b) the criterion attitudes of male and female survey respondents and sex differences in the criterion attitudes. Nevertheless, analyses of discrepancies between the estimated and criterion attitudes revealed a systematic bias by which participants consistently underestimated men's support for female-stereotypic positions on issues. Further analyses of these data suggested that this error rose from perceptions that men would oppose policies that favored women's interests. In contrast, perceived female group interest functioned as a cue to accuracy in estimating women's attitudes.     

Gender and Aggression in Marital Relationships: A Life-Span Perspective

This study examines the relationship between age, gender, and marital aggression by comparing conflict resolution strategies, physical aggression, and injury across 6,185 married young, middle and older aged men and women. We found a consistent age effect such that younger participants used more maladaptive conflict resolution strategies, engaged in more physical arguments, and sustained more injuries than older participants. In terms of gender differences, women compared to men used calm discussions less (the least reported by women who were young) and heated arguments more. Analyses on the relation among age, gender, and injuries showed that more young and middle-aged women than men reported that they had sustained injuries at the hands of their spouse and more young men than women reported inflicting injury on their spouse. The results are discussed in relation to research on gender differences in intimate violence and the association of age and intimate aggression in general.     

Social incentives for gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it does hurt to ask

Four experiments show that gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations may be explained by differential treatment of men and women when they attempt to negotiate. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. Evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations. In Experiment 3, participants evaluated videotapes of candidates who accepted compensation offers or initiated negotiations. Male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations; female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance to female negotiators. In Experiment 4, participants adopted the candidate’s perspective and assessed whether to initiate negotiations in same scenario used in Experiment 3. With male evaluators, women were less inclined than men to negotiate, and nervousness explained this effect. There was no gender difference when evaluator was female.     

Social Status, Not Gender Alone, Is Implicated in Different Reactions By Women and Men to Social Ostracism

Williams and Sommer found that ostracized women, but not men, worked harder on a subsequent collective task, speculating that women’s social compensation was motivated by threatened belongingness. The present 2?×?3 design with 180 U.S. women and men replicated this gender gap in work contributions then closed it using two status-manipulations that favored women’s task abilities or the higher education of undergraduates with high school partners. Additional analyses identified three clusters of participants who failed to compensate: only men in the replication control, women scoring low in self-monitoring, and participants who persisted unsuccessfully to resist exclusion. These patterns shift our focus away from gender and threatened belongingness toward control and status as explanations for the original gender difference.     

Negational racial identity and presidential voting preferences

Previous research suggests that narrow identification with one’s own racial group impedes coalition building among minorities. Consistent with this research, the 2008 Democratic primary was marked by racial differences in voting preferences: Black voters overwhelmingly preferred Barack Obama, a Black candidate, and Latinos and Asians largely favored Hillary Clinton, a White candidate. We investigated one approach to overcoming this divide: highlighting one’s negational identity. In two experiments simulating primary polling procedures, Asians and Latinos randomly assigned to think of and categorize themselves in negational terms (i.e., being non-White) were more likely to vote for Obama than participants focused on their affirmational identity (i.e, being Asian or Latino), who showed the typical preference for Clinton. This shift in voting preference was partially mediated by warmer attitudes towards other minority groups. These results suggest that negational identity is a meaningful source of social identity and demonstrate that whether one thinks about “who one is” versus “who one is not” has far-reaching impact for real-world decisions.     

Of Men and Money: Characteristics of Occupations that Affect the Gender Differentiation of Children’s Occupational Interests

Occupational interests become gender differentiated during childhood and remain so among adults. Two characteristics of occupations may contribute to this differentiation: the gender of individuals who typically perform the occupation (workers’ gender) and the particular goals that the occupation allows one to fulfill, such as the opportunity to help others or acquire power (value affordances). Two studies tested hypotheses about whether U.S. 6- to 11-year-olds show gender differences in their interest in novel jobs that were depicted as (a) being performed by men versus women and (b) affording money, power, family, or helping values. In Study 1, 98 children rank-ordered their preferences for experimentally-manipulated novel jobs, and they answered questions about their occupational values and the value affordances of jobs in which men and women typically work. In Study 2, a second sample of 65 children was used to test the replicability of findings from Study 1. As hypothesized, children were more interested in jobs depicted with same- than other-gender workers in both studies. Boys showed greater interest than did girls in novel jobs depicted as affording money in Study 1, but not Study 2. Explicit knowledge that men and women typically work in jobs that afford differing values increased with participants’ age.     

Gender,status and the use of power strategies

The present study examined the effects of gender and status on the use of power strategies. The experiment consisted of a computer‐based problem‐solving task performed in pairs, where participants interacted with simulated long‐distance partners. Participants were 36 female and 38 male undergraduate students, who were assigned to be influencing agents and were required to convince their partners to accept their help in the problem‐solving process. Status was manipulated by the extent to which partners were dependent upon the participants' resources. Partners were either same sex or other sex. Results indicated an interactive effect of agent gender by status. Men used more frequently ‘masculine’‐typed and less frequently ‘feminine’‐typed strategies than did women in low status positions, whereas in high status positions no significant gender differences in power strategy choices were found. These findings suggest that gender differences and similarities vary according to social contexts. Implications of the findings for both theory and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived proposer personality characteristics and gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers

In a highly influential paper, Clark and Hatfield (1989) demonstrated that, whereas men were quite likely to accept a casual sexual offer from a confederate research assistant, women never did so. The current research provides a more in-depth explanation of gender differences in acceptance of casual sex offers via 4 (quasi-) experiments. First, using a person-perception paradigm, I assessed people's impressions of women and men who proposed a casual sexual encounter in the same manner that confederates in Clark and Hatfield did. Women and men agreed that female proposers were more intelligent, successful, and sexually skilled than men who made the same proposals. Second, I demonstrated that the large gender differences from the original Clark and Hatfield study could be eliminated by asking participants to imagine proposals from (attractive and unattractive) famous individuals, friends, and same-gender individuals. Next, I assessed factors associated with likelihood of agreeing to the casual sex proposal. The extent to which women and men believed that the proposer would be sexually skilled predicted how likely they would be to engage in casual sex with this individual. Finally, I examined these factors in the context of actual encounters from the participants' previous experiences, and the results were replicated in this context. Overall findings suggest that the large gender differences Clark and Hatfield observed in acceptance of the casual sex offer may have more to do with perceived personality characteristics of the female versus male proposers than with gender differences among Clark and Hatfield's participants and that sexual pleasure figures largely in women's and men's decision making about casual sex.     

Making gender matter: the role of gender-based expectancies and gender identification on women's and men's math performance in Sweden

It is well established that an emphasis on gender differences may have a negative effect on women's math performance in USA, Germany and the Netherlands. It has further been found that an individual's identification with the stereotyped group may moderate effects of negative stereotypes. The present study investigated how gender-based expectancies affected the math performance of women and men in Sweden, a nation with a smaller gender gap than in other countries, and a strong cultural emphasis on gender equality. Participants, 112 female and 74 male undergraduate math students from Swedish universities, completed a difficult math test in which their gender was either linked to their test performance or not. Men performed better than women when gender was made relevant among participants who did not see their gender as an important aspect of their identity, while participants high in gender identification were unaffected by gender identity relevance. Moreover, the gender relevance manipulation affected men's performance more than women's. The results deviate from findings on US samples, indicating that the role of group identification as a moderator of stereotype-based expectancy effects is complex, and that factors in the cultural context may interact with individual differences in identification to determine the impact of negative stereotypes.     

Age,Race, and Sex Similarity to Candidates and Voting Preference1

One thousand five hundred and seven voters aged 18 to over 75 from many different geographical areas were presented with pairs of candidates in a simulated mayoral election who differed in sex, race, or age and were asked to “vote.” Results confirmed the conclusions of previous research on undergraduate students (Sigelman & Sigelman, 1982), which found a stronger effect of the age of candidates than of either their sex or their race on voting, and also demonstrated race and sex similarity effects in voting preference. The present study also demonstrated a significant age-similarity effect. Voters over 65 showed a marked “reverse ageism” effect, actively preferring the older of any pair of candidates that differed significantly in age. Complex effects of the race and sex of experimenters on voting preference, interpreted as salience effects, were also obtained. Implications for actual electoral outcomes in the situation of an aging population are discussed.     

Gender role and personality disorders

Many researchers have hypothesized relationships between personality disorders and gender role (i.e., masculinity and femininity). However, research has not addressed if people who are masculine or feminine more often meet the criteria for personality disorders. The present study examined whether college students (N = 665, 60% women) higher in masculinity or femininity more often exhibited features of the 10 DSM-IV personality disorders. Feminine men exhibited more features of all the personality disorders except antisocial. Dependent traits were associated with higher femininity and lower masculinity. Antisocial traits were associated with masculinity. Both men and women who typically behaved consistent with their gender had more narcissistic and histrionic features, whereas participants who typically behaved unlike their gender had more features of the Cluster A personality disorders.     

When Is Dominance Related to Smiling? Assigned Dominance, Dominance Preference, Trait Dominance, and Gender as Moderators

We investigated gender and different types of dominance measures as potential moderators of the relation between dominance and smiling. We asked participants about their preference for either a dominant or a subordinate role (dominance preference), randomly assigned one of these roles to them (assigned dominance), and assessed trait dominance, felt dominance, and perceived dominance. Participants had two 8-min dyadic interactions in same-gender groups (33 all-women dyads, 36 all-men dyads), in which one was assigned to be the owner of an art gallery and the other was assigned to be the assistant to the owner. Interactions were videotaped, and smiling and perceived dominance were assessed on the basis of the videotapes. Both the particular dominance measure and gender moderated the relation between dominance and smiling. Results showed that for women in subordinate positions, those who wanted to be in a subordinate position smiled more than those who wanted to be in a dominant position. No such effect occurred for men and for participants in assigned dominant positions.     

Perceptions of Gender Differences in Self-Report Measures of Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) refers to the abilities/competencies that an individual has about emotions and has proven to be related to positive aspects in life. Despite its growing relevance, results about the existence and magnitude of gender differences have been inconclusive, with some studies suggesting that such differences depend on the theoretical approach and type of instrument used. In an effort to better understand these relationships, this study examined the stereotyped nature of self-report instruments of EI from the two main theoretical EI approaches (ability-based and mixed models). Two hundred sixty Spanish undergraduates from a university in the South of Spain indicated the extent to which they considered several EI competences as typical of women/men. Results show that most EI dimensions are biased by gender stereotypes, in terms of being perceived as more characteristic of one gender or the other. An in-group gender bias appeared particularly among female participants whereby they attributed higher scores to women than to men in most EI dimensions. Men also favored men giving higher scores than women did in some of the dimensions. These results suggest that self-report EI measures may be influenced by gender stereotypes, which has relevant implications for EI researchers.     

Lazos que Atan: The Influence of Normative Gender Beliefs on Sexual Risk Behaviors of Latino Men and Women

Not all Latino men and women conform to proscribed gender roles. Nonetheless, their sexual risk taking may well be influenced by traditional beliefs concerning these roles. We explored the relationship between gender beliefs that are normative in Latino culture, and the sexual risk behaviors of 152 Latino men and women who participated in a behavioral rapid needs assessment survey in Houston, TX. Path—analytic results indicate that normative gender beliefs are influenced by respondents' sex and their levels of acculturation and that these 2 variables influence sexual risk behaviors, including unprotected sex and multi partnerism. Our results suggest that beliefs about gender influence sexual behavior and, therefore, are an important factor that should be considered in understanding sexual risk taking among Latinos.     

Dimensions of the Male Gender Role: A Confirmatory Analysis in Men and Women

As researchers become more interested instudying the influences of the male gender role onpeople's physical and psychological well-being, measuresof several male role domains have been created,including psychological agency, traditional attitudestowards men, and masculine gender role stress (MGRS).These measures of the male gender role, however,typically have been constructed and validated using only samples of men. This restriction introducesquestions about the reliability and validity of theseinstruments in samples of women, leading to problemswhen generalizing findings to this group. The present study addressed these issues by examining thefactor structure, factor correlations, and latent meansof these three male role measures for a sample of mostlyCaucasian men and women, using multiple group confirmatory factor analytic techniques.Results showed only the dimensionality of the agenticpersonality traits differed significantly for men andwomen. The interrelationships among and latent means of agency, attitudes, and MGRS differed by sex.These findings demonstrate the utility of the currentconceptualization of sex and gender; in other words,that gender is not totally determined by sexand that men and women internalize many of the samegender cues, but differentially endorse them to varyingdegrees.     

My Place or Yours?

A common stereotype holds that men are more preoccupied with sex than women are. To test the validity of this stereotype, and the degree to which women and men conform to sexually restrictive gender roles, we asked participants to describe and rate their beliefs about sex. We then factor analyzed these beliefs and achieved a simple structure of four factors: (a) Personally and Physically Pleasurable, (b) Beneficial to the Self-in-relationship, (c) Personally Costly, and (d) Sex as a Violation of Social Injunctions. We used scores on these subscales to compare women’s and men’s sexual stereotypes and behaviors. Although men showed significantly greater interest in sex on three of the four factors, when we examined sex in an intimate relationship, women and men were more alike than different. The data provide evidence that gender roles are malleable and that women and men are free to choose the degree to which they conform to sexually restrictive gender roles. Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Minority stress and mental health among Dutch LGBs: examination of differences between sex and sexual orientation

Minority stress is often cited as an explanation for greater mental health problems among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals than heterosexual individuals. However, studies focusing on sex or sexual orientation differences in level of minority stress and its impact on mental health are scarce, even more so outside the United States. Performing secondary analyses on the data of a Dutch population study on sexual health, the present study examines the robustness of the minority stress model by explaining mental health problems among men and women with mostly or only same-sex sexual attraction, and men and women who are equally attracted to same-sex and opposite-sex partners in the "gay-friendly" Netherlands (N = 389; 118 gay men, 40 bisexual men, 184 lesbian women, and 54 bisexual women). Results showed that minority stress is also related to mental health of Dutch LGBs. Participants with a higher level of internalized homonegativity and those who more often encountered negative reactions from other people on their same-sex sexual attraction reported more mental health problems. Such negative reactions from others, however, had a stronger link with mental health among lesbian/gay than among bisexual participants. Openness about one's sexual orientation was related to better mental health among sexual minority women, but not among their male counterparts. Suggestions for future research, implications for counseling, and other societal interventions are discussed.     

Am I the Right Candidate? Self-Ascribed Fit of Women and Men to a Leadership Position

Women are assumed to show a self-ascribed lack-of-fit to leadership positions compared to men (Heilman Research in Organizational Behavior 5:269–298, 1983). The present study examined whether this gender difference would diminish when agency is accounted for and whether a stimulus person’s gender would alter women’s self-ascribed fit. German management students (91 women, 95 men) received a fictitious recruitment advertisement for a leadership position that portrayed a man, a woman, or both a man and a woman. Participants indicated their perceptions of agency and suitability to the advertised position. As predicted, women judged themselves as less suitable for the leadership position than men and participants’ self-reported agency mediated this effect. Furthermore, all participants felt most suitable if a male and a female stimulus person were portrayed.