Confronting Sexism: Promoting Confrontation Acceptance and Reducing Stereotyping through Stereotype Framing

Abstract

Relative to confrontations of other forms of prejudice and stereotyping, confronting gender stereotypes can be challenging, in part, because recipients may be unlikely to accept such feedback. Given the importance of accepting negative feedback in the promotion of reparative efforts, the present research investigated how to frame confrontations of gender stereotyping to be more readily accepted. Across three experiments (131 and 247 U.S. undergraduates; 174 U.S. MTurk workers), we investigated how different framings for confrontations of gender stereotyping, framed as targeting either positive or negative gender stereotypes, impacted participants’ confrontation acceptance, reduction of subsequent gender stereotyping, and concern with expressing gender bias in the future. After expressing stereotypes of women, participants were confronted or not. Confronted participants received feedback that their responses were prejudiced because they included positive or negative stereotypes of women. Results revealed that participants perceived the positive framing more favorably and were more likely to accept (i.e., believe to be accurate) the positive framing relative to the negative framing. Despite different reactions between confrontation framings, both the positive and negative confrontation framings similarly reduced subsequent gender stereotyping relative to no confrontation. Furthermore, both confrontation framings increased participants’ concerns with expressing gender stereotypes in the future. Taken together, these results provide initial insight about how to increase acceptance of confrontations of sexism and how to reduce stereotyping.