Beyond Mars and Venus: The role of gender essentialism in support for gender inequality and backlash.

Lea Skewes,Nick Haslam,Cordelia Fine,Sergi Lozano

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0200921

Lea Skewes, Nick Haslam + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200921

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Abstract

It has been argued that gender essentialism impedes progress towards greater gender equality. Here we present a new gender essentialism scale (GES), and validate it in two large nationally representative samples from Denmark and Australia. In both samples the GES was highly reliable and predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and support for gender discrimination, as well as perceived fairness of gender-based treatment in the Australian sample, independently of two established predictors (i.e., social dominance orientation and conservative political orientation). In addition, gender essentialism assessed by the GES moderated some manifestations of the backlash effect: high essentialists were more likely to respond negatively towards a power-seeking female political candidate relative to a male candidate. Given the implications for possible workplace interventions, further work could usefully explore whether gender essentialism moderates other well-established forms of gender bias.

Highlights

Expressions like “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” reflect essentialist thinking: the belief that all members of a category share fundamental or ‘essential’ qualities that make them what they are
Thirty-one candidate items for the Gender Essentialism Scale (GES) were written by the second and third authors based on previous conceptual analyses of essentialist thinking, and those of Haslam et al [2] and Rothbart and Taylor [3], which see it as understanding social categories as biologically grounded natural kinds
Gender essentialists regard gender differences as natural, fixed, deep-seated, discrete, informative, and fundamental, beliefs that often rest on a biogenetic understanding of the sources of gender difference

Summary

Introduction

Expressions like “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” reflect essentialist thinking: the belief that all members of a category share fundamental or ‘essential’ qualities that make them what they are. Theorists and researchers [1,2,3,4] have proposed that essentialist thinking involves beliefs that a human group is natural, immutable, discrete, informative, historically and cross-culturally invariant, and grounded in deepseated, biological, factors. Some researchers have argued that psychological essentialism can sometimes implicate beliefs in social rather than biological determinism [5], the natural kind understanding of essentialism is dominant. Gender is one of the first social categories we learn to apply [6] It is strongly essentialized (e.g., [7]), and gender categories are often understood as biologically based ‘natural kinds’ [2, 8].

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