Does he see what she sees? The gender gap in perceptions of institutional sexism

ABSTRACT

Women are more likely than men to perceive institutional sexism. In the present study, we examined the gender gap in perceptions of a legal case in which a female plaintiff claims she was a victim of institutional gender discrimination by an employer. Participants were randomly assigned to receive information about institutional forms of sexism (or not) prior to learning the facts of the case. In addition, participants were randomly assigned to take the female plaintiff’s perspective (or remain objective) while reviewing the case. In isolation, sexism awareness and perspective-taking both independently eliminated the gender gap in perceptions of discrimination. However, contrary to expectations, the gender gap reemerged among participants who were made aware of sexism prior to perspective-taking such that women perceived more discrimination than men. Implications for interventions to increase perceptions of institutional sexism are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional sexism
• perspective-taking
• sexism awareness

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the research assistants from the Social Perception Lab at Tulane University for their help collecting and coding data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2085543.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2085543 .

Notes

1. If we remove the 39 participants who incorrectly reported that they had or had not read the passage describing what institutional sexism is, then we see a significant effect of awareness condition such that participants in the awareness condition (M = 5.20, SD = 1.30) reported feeling significantly more knowledgeable than participants in the no awareness condition (M = 4.84, SD = 1.35), F(1, 264) = 4.63, p = .03 η_p² = .02, 90% CI [.0008, .05]. However, based on the recommendations from Berinsky et al. (2014), we did not eliminate these 39 participants from our analyses, and our hypothesis testing results remain unchanged. For transparency, analyses can be conducted with and without these participants using filters provided in our OSF dataset.

2. We report partial η² as a measure of effect size with 90% confidence intervals around the partial η². According to Steiger (2004), p. 90% confidence intervals are the appropriate choice for partial η² when alpha is .05.”

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.