Prejudice against Women: A Replication and Extension

Abstract

Goldberg (1, 2 ) has investigated prejudice by women toward other women in the area of intellectual and professional competency. Using identical articles concerned with six professional fields he manipulated only the sex of the aurhor's name. H e found that college women were more critical and negative toward articles purportedly written by women, regardless of the probability of success for women in the professional field, than they were of the same articles supposedly written by men. While a recent study ( 3 ) replicated Goldberg's findings using a portion of his articles (those in which females have a low probability of success), the present study was designed to extend this line of investigation by re-examining prejudice using Goldberg's ( 2 ) non-sexually stereotypic articles with both college men and women. Ss were 27 male and 31 female freshmen at the University of Connecticut who volunteered as part of their course requirement. Each S was given a booklet which contained 4 articles selected from the professional literamre of 4 occupational fields (art history, education, dietetics, and linguistics). The procedure, articles, nine evaluative questions following each article, and the treatment of the data were identical to Goldberg (1, 2 ) . In contrast to the Goldberg findings (1, 2 ) , the results indicated that college men and women did not rate articles purportedly written by women as less competent than the same articles supposedly written by men. Male-authored articles swayed females' opinions on issues more than female-authored articles (Ms = 7.6121.60 vs 6.90&1.68) but onlv this 1 of 58 possible comparisons reached significance. It is regarded as chance factor. The present authors suggest that the many subtle, but significant changes in feminine emancipation, while far from complete, may be a contributing factor to the present results.