Analysing Beliefs

The final analytic category of relevance to the current thesis is beliefs. Research into gender-related beliefs is vast and encompasses the study of attitudes, stereotypes, biases, norms, and identities (Waylen, Celis, Kantla & Weldon, 2013). Each of these constructs may be defined in numerous ways depending on the discipline, or even specific text or article, but generally speaking they may be defined as follows: attitudes typically refer to valenced evaluations or associations about a specific social group (e.g., women are bad); stereotypes are beliefs or

assumptions about a group’s typical, natural, or essential behaviour (e.g., women are nurturing; men should be strong); social bias describes the cognitive, perceptual or behavioural tendency to favour or be prejudiced against one group over another (e.g., hiring a man over a woman); and norms are the broad beliefs about what is normal, normative, or appropriate for a particular social group (or system) (Greenwald, Rudman, Nosek, Banaji, Farnham & Mellott, 2002; Paluck & Ball, 2010). Gender identity then refers to the broad set of associations or beliefs that make up a person’s gender self-concept, as well as the specific labels a person may use to refer to

themselves within a particular culture (Richards & Barker, 2015). As the bodies of research for each construct are broad, the following review will focus on the areas most relevant to a discussion of the binary: essentialist and/or gender-as-binary beliefs; anti-women or pro-male bias; gender stereotypes and/or the endorsement of traditional gender roles; and gender identity/self-concept. Moreover, while beliefs may be assessed using any number of qualitative or quantitative methods, this review will limit itself to literature relying on explicit self-report measures (e.g., scales and questionnaires). This is because self-reports are by far the most widely used

measurement tool for analysing beliefs (see Deaux & Snyder, 2012), and also because this review has already covered other analytic paradigms and techniques for measuring the binary (e.g., cultural criticism, discourse analysis, etc.).

To look first at essentialism, research has measured different aspects of essentialist beliefs in various ways. Some studies have focused on biological determinism, examining, for example, how strongly people endorse biological explanations of gender (Keller, 2005), encourage essentialist research or ideas (Morton et al., 2009), or believe that biology necessitates women and men’s roles in society (Tinsley et al., 2015). Others have focused on the immutability of gender differences. Brescoll, Uhlmann and Newman (2013), for example, measured how strongly participants endorsed biological/natural explanations of gender difference and also the extent to which they believed these differences could be changed by environmental influence. A small number of questionnaires specifically intended to measure essentialism and/or binarism have been developed in recently years,

including the Heteronormativity Attitudes and Beliefs Scale (HABS: Habarth, 2015). The HABS assesses both gender and sexuality-related beliefs but includes a specific subscale for measuring the binary structure and composition of gender (with items

such as “There are only two genders”). Skewes, Fine and Haslam (2018) recently developed the Gender Essentialism Scale (GES) as a way to measure the various different components of essentialist or binarist thinking. Specifically, this scale is intended to capture the beliefs that gender differences are discrete, biologically based, immutable, inherent, historically invariant, and highly informative.

With regards to anti-women sentiment, a range of measures have been

developed over the past 50 years to assess sexism in its various forms. These include classic misogyny questionnaires, such as the Attitudes towards Women Scale (AWS: Spence & Heilmrich, 1972). The AWS was initially developed as a way to measure hateful or negative views about women relative to men, including items such as “Swearing and obscenity are more repulsive in the speech of a woman than of a man.” Since the 1970s, measures have evolved to assess more contemporary sexist beliefs as well as the more explicit prejudice. The Modern Sexism Scale (MS: Swim et al., 1995), for example, includes separate subscales for “old-fashioned” sexism (with items similar to the AWS) and modern sexism, characterised more by a rejection of women’s rights movements (e.g., “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States”). The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI: Glick & Fiske, 2000) similarly attempts to capture different types of sexist attitudes, measuring both hostile (e.g., “Women are too easily offended”) and benevolent (but still harmful) beliefs about women (e.g., “Women should be cherished and protected by men”). More recently, researchers have sought to measure more nuanced or subtle forms of anti-women prejudice, such as an individual’s level of endorsement with various structural inequalities. For example, studies have recently examined individual differences in “choice” explanations of workplace inequality that is, the extent to which they believe inequality results from women’s own life choices

(Skewes, Fine & Haslam, 2018). Other studies have focused on how women are evaluated or punished when they deviate the prescribed communal gender role (i.e., opt not to have children, behave in an agentic manner, or occupy a traditionally masculine social role). As discussed previously, these “backlash effects” are well- documented, particularly in the context of women in leadership (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Rudman, 2012).

Stereotypes are another widely measured construct within gender studies and social psychology. As reviewed at length above, numerous studies have shown that women and men are associated with vastly different attributes, abilities, traits, skills and interests, with women more readily associated with subordinate or care roles and men with dominant or leadership roles (e.g., Keonig et al., 2010). These stereotypes are both pervasive and broad, with stereotyping found across virtually all

demographic groups (i.e., age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) and most societal spheres and domains (e.g., play, education, work, politics, and so on: see Waylen et al., 2013). In addition to understanding the content of these gendered associations, research has examined the dimensions or structure of the stereotypes themselves. For instance, theorists have assessed the extent to which female and male stereotypes respectively map onto established stereotype dimensions of communion and agency (discussed previously: Eagly & Karau, 2002), warmth and competency (Cuddy, Fiske & Glick, 2008), or expressivity and instrumentality (Kachel et al., 2016). Other research has focused on the functions of gender stereotypes, and the ways in which they set out rules for appropriate gender behaviour (Ridgeway, 2011). Evidence suggests, for example, that gender stereotypes are not merely descriptions of men and women’s typical behaviour; rather, they are comprehensive, prescriptive, and proscriptive

norms about appropriate male and female behaviour (e.g., men shouldn’t cry, women should be nice, etc.: Keonig, 2018; Prentice & Carranaza, 2002).

As with gender beliefs, individual variation in gender identity or self-concept has historically been measured using self-report techniques. These include the early masculinity-femininity and androgyny scales discussed previously (e.g., Terman, 1936: Bem, 1974) as well as more recent assessments of self-gender trait

associations (Kachel et al., 2016). Gender identity may also be assessed in clinical settings using both observational and clinical assessment measures. These

assessments would normally take place within the context of a gender dysphoria diagnosis (defined in the DSM-V as the distress associated when a person’s gender identity does not align with their assigned sex at birth), and thus tend to focus as much on the person’s well-being as their gender concordance (see Schneider et al., 2016). Popular assessments include the Utrecht Gender Dysphoria Scale (Cohen- Kettenis & van Goozen, 1997) and the Gender Identity/Gender Dysphoria

Questionnaire for Adolescents and Adults (Deogracias et al., 2007), as well as sub- clinical assessments of distress like the Masculine Gender Role Stress scale (MGRS: Eisler, 1987). While many of these measures assess gender identity along masculine- feminine lines (e.g., as a position on a unipolar masculine-feminine dimension, or as scores on two separate intersecting dimensions: see Kachel et al., 2016), theorists have begun to acknowledge the complexity of identification process, as well as the degree to which gender intersects with other forms of identity. The recently

developed Sexual Configurations Theory (SCT: Van Anders, 2015), for example, proposes gender identity intersects with various other dimensions within a person’s sex/gender self-concept (including sexual attractions, desires, preferences within partnered and solo sexuality, and so on). According to Van Anders, the failure of

traditional theory to acknowledge the diversity and complexity of these intersecting dimensions (or indeed their contextual variation) has led to a reductionist,

heteronormative gender identity framework (i.e., that can only meaningfully explain traditional gender/sex dyadic pairings).

While gender attitude, stereotype, and identity processes are viewed as distinct psychological constructs and have their own bodies of literature and

evidence (Richards & Barker, 2015), it is important at this stage to review how they relate to one another, and indeed other forms of social prejudice and discrimination. A key assumption made within the feminist literature is that a binarist, patriarchal ideology has consequences for gender equality (e.g., Ridgeway, 2011), and indeed a review of the research suggests many of the above beliefs inter-correlate or overlap. Essentialism, for instance, has been shown to predict negative evaluations or beliefs about women (Keller, 2005; Skewes et al., 2018), endorsement of traditional

breadwinner/provider gender roles (Gaunt, 2006; Tinsley et al., 2016) and broader gender stereotyping (Meyer & Gelman, 2016). Similarly, sexism is associated with a range of other discriminatory attitudes (e.g., racism, ageism, ableism: see Baldwin, 2017) and prejudicial gender behaviours, such as hiring discrimination (Fiske & lee, 2008), androcentric bias (Bailey & LaFrance, 2018), and sexual harassment

proclivity (Rudman & Mescher, 2012). A number of studies have also examined the relationship between gender beliefs and the broader endorsement of conservative worldviews. Skewes et al. (2018), for example, found a relationship between

essentialism and an endorsement of structural gender inequalities, while Christopher and Mull (2006) showed that ambivalent sexism predicted participants’ alignment with a conservative ideology. Traditional gender views have similarly been found to correlate with right wing authoritarianism (Sibley, Wilson & Duckitt, 2007), as well

as system-justification or status-quo explanations of gender inequality (Keller, 2005; Morton et al., 2016).

In addition to research showing how these beliefs may coalesce to form and reflect a patriarchal value system, it would also be useful at this stage to review how a person’s own gender may influence their gender world view. Generally speaking, research suggests that men have more conservative, sexist, and androcentric gender beliefs than women. Men are also more likely to use sexist language, discriminate based on gender, disregard or downplay feminist efforts, and more generally endorse a politically conservative worldview (see Cameron, 1998 and Weatherall, 2005 for reviews). While these effects are generally robust, it should be noted that the reliability and magnitude of gender differences varies considerably across studies and contexts. For example, essentialist beliefs do not always differ across gender groups (e.g., Skewes et al., 2018), and both women and men have been shown to endorse gender-normative expectations (e.g., by negatively evaluating those who deviate from prescribed gender norms: Acker, 2009; Campbell, 2004; McCreary, 1994; Smiler, 2004). Similarly, though the strength of stereotypes can vary across genders, studies show the content tends to be broadly similar (Deaux et al., 1985; Fiske, 2010; Koenig, 2018). According to Glick and Fiske (2000), this is largely because women and men have access to the same pervasive, dominant ideological information. Moreover, studies suggest that women are often rewarded for

expressing traditional gender views, rejecting feminist/egalitarian perspectives, or engaging in sexist “banter” and behaviour (e.g., Bearman, Korobov & Thorne, 2009; Ficher, 2006). Gaunt (2013) therefore argues against treating gender as a simple moderator of discriminatory attitudes and behaviour. Rather, it should be

gendered experiences and exposures over the lifespan, and thus their core beliefs and assumptions about gender.