Deservingness Perceptions Toward Refugees: A Gender Perspective

Abstract

Refugee men are found to be less deserving of government support than refugee women. However, is this still the case if they engage in economic reciprocal behavior and attitudes? Following theories on gender stereotypes and benevolent sexism, we argue that economic activity is expected less of female than of male refugees and that this translates into gendered perceptions of deservingness of financial support. Analyzing data from a 2016 factorial survey experiment in Germany, we show that male refugees are more likely to get “punished” if unwilling to work. Future studies should thus include gender-related aspects when assessing deservingness perceptions.

Keywords:

• Deservingness
• refugees
• gender
• stereotype
• benevolent sexism
• factorial survey experiment

Disclosure Statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data are available upon request. Please contact Verena Seibel at [email protected].

Notes

1 While an investigation of gender stereotypes extended by different family constellations would have been highly interesting to consider, certain compromises with regard to the scope of the vignettes had to be made. Choosing to represent also our female vignette refugees as singles and without children should decrease the likelihood of gender stereotypes illustrating female refugees as needy, given that they are stereotypically associated with childrearing and as traveling after their spouses (see Mascini and van Bochove, 2009). With regard to female refugees we thus utilized a conservative arrangement with respect to our expected effect.

2 57,06% of respondents were male, vis-à-vis around 46,79% in the overall population at that time (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2018). Our sample mean age of 43,26 years was slightly higher than the population mean of 41 years (Destatis, 2023), and indications of political leaning on a 1-11 left-right scale averaged at 3,55 instead of 5,42 in the overall population (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2018). Finally, 82,06% of our respondents possessed qualifications for university entrance, compared to 48,38% in the overall population (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2018).

3 This is corroborated by the significant interactions between the different levels of education and German language skills of the refugee (see Model m1education5 in our Robustness Checks and Additional Analyses R Script and Table 3 and Figure 3 in the Robustness Checks).

4 See Model m1respage1 in our Robustness Checks and Additional Analyses Appendix R script and Table 4 in the Robustness Checks.

5 All additional analyses are presented in the Robustness Checks and Additional Analyses Appendix R script.

6 However, as model m1respleftright8 in our Robustness Checks and Additional Analyses Appendix R script shows, this is mostly driven by politically left-leaning respondents of which we have a disproportionate amount in our sample. See also Table 5 and Figure 4 in our Robustness Checks.

7 Compare model m1sex3 in our Robustness Checks and Additional Analyses R Script: Interacting the vignette’s gender with its country of origin yielded merely mildly significant (p < 0.1), negative effects only when comparing male Syrians and Eritreans to male Eastern-Ukrainians, meaning that Eastern-Ukrainian males were considered least deserving. Support for females did not differ comparing refugees from the different countries.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported as part of the Project “Einstellungen zur Fluechtlingssituation” (Attitudes toward the Refugee Situation), funded by the “Independent Research Start-Up Grant” (IRSG), Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz.