Effects of Benevolent and Hostile Sexism on Women's Verbal and Quantitative Performance

Abstract

The effects of benevolent and hostile sexism (BS and HS) on women's cognitive performance (CP), and the role of several variables in this effect were examined. There are different predictions about the effects of BS and HS on women’s CP: Both the “activation of stereotypes” and "mental intrusions” views predicted that the exposure to BS will lead to decrease in CP, but they rationalized it differently. “Anger-based reaction” view predicted that exposure to HS would increase CP. Previously; a study conducted in Belgium supported the mental intrusions view (Dardanne, Dumont & Bollier, 2007). The current study reported the results of two experiments in which the validity of the earlier results were re-tested in a Turkish context. Data were collected from 80 female in the first experiment and 159 female in the second one and participants were assigned to one of those conditions: BS, HS or Control in both of the experiments and verbal and quantitative tests were used for measuring CP. In the Experiment#1, verbal performance was higher in the HS condition than BS condition. This relationship was found to be moderated by neither gender identification nor self-esteem As the anger-based reaction view was the only one predicting a higher CP in the HS condition, the participants' anger and other emotions were measured in Experiment 2 to examine this view in more detail. Verbal performance was found to be higher in HS condition than the other conditions, and anger mediated the relationship between verbal performance and the exposure to HS.

Keywords

• hostile sexims
• benevolent sexism
• verbal performance
• quantitative performance
• anger