Abstract
Despite growing public awareness and policy efforts, gender equality has not yet been fully established in Western societies. Previous research has shown that hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes, which are grounded in traditional gender stereotypes, play a key role in the reproduction of gender inequalities. Whereas, hostile and benevolent sexism among adolescents has been previously studied, limited attention has been paid to social characteristics in understanding the support for these attitudes. In this article, we aim to study how the family, the school and romantic partnerships relate to adolescents' benevolent and hostile sexist attitudes. We relied on data gathered in 2013 by the Flemish Youth Research Platform and performed multivariate analyses on 755 parent-child dyads (n♂ = 342; n♀ = 413). Our results indicate that social characteristics especially matter to explain the variation in benevolent sexist attitudes among girls and hostile sexist attitudes among boys. Among girls, being in a romantic relationship and parents' traditional moral beliefs was strongly related to benevolent sexism; while for boys, hostile sexism was strongly related to being enrolled in technical and vocational education. In the conclusion, we elaborate on the implications of our findings.
Highlights
In recent years gender equality has received growing public attention, but has become an important policy topic in Western societies
Girls scored higher on the items tapping into benevolent sexism than boys, while the opposite was found for hostile sexism where the mean scores on the items were higher for boys
The results showed that differences occur in the endorsement of sexist attitudes with regards to adolescent boys’ and girls’ social characteristics
Summary
In recent years gender equality has received growing public attention, but has become an important policy topic in Western societies. From the age of 4 to 5 years old, children reveal gender stereotypical preferences with, for example, girls preferring romantic stories and boys leaning toward the more adventurous ones (Durkin and Nugent, 1998) These gender stereotypes carry cultural meanings, practices and (role) expectations that organize life by Sexism in Social Spheres often (subtly) influencing and guiding people’s beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors (Eckes and Trautner, 2000; Ridgeway and Correll, 2004). Sexist attitudes and beliefs confine and influence future life trajectories by (often subtly) influencing beliefs, feelings, and behaviors (Eckes and Trautner, 2000; Ridgeway and Correll, 2004) They prescribe gender-specific behaviors and roles that hinder young people’s ability to discern the variety of emotional, social, and educational capacities and options that can be envisioned (Rainey and Rust, 1999; Paul Halpern and Perry-Jenkins, 2016). This undermines (policy) efforts that strive for gender equality (Glick et al, 2001)
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