Benevolent Sexism and Cross-Gender Helping: A Subtle Reinforcement of Existing Gender Relations

Abstract

The interdependence between men and women creates frequent opportunities to engage in cross-gender helping, and benevolent sexist ideas about the nature of gender relations prescribe particular forms of offering and seeking help between men and women. The research presented in this chapter investigated how benevolent sexism – namely, the belief that women are pure creatures who need to be protected by men – leads both women and men to engage in dependency-oriented helping and to endorse hierarchy-maintaining (rather than hierarchy-challenging) policies intended to help women. Across four studies, we found that the endorsement of or exposure to benevolent sexism predicted: (a) support for policies that help women only if these policies do not challenge traditional gender roles, (b) men’s preference for providing women (but not men) with dependency-oriented help rather than tools for autonomous coping, and (c) women’s preference for seeking dependency-oriented help rather than tools for autonomous coping from men (but not from women). We discuss the implications of this subtle bias in cross-gender helping for inhibiting social change toward greater gender equality.