Abstract
Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face backlash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of support for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Separate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new measure of individuals’ endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accommodations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribution of labor between work and family spheres, and discriminatory workplace behaviors. Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology.
Highlights
For more than a decade, the dominant social-psychological approach to studying gendered workplace inequality and discrimination has been to investigate the role of descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes (e.g., [1])
The results suggest that the SSI successfully served a palliative function, helping participants to resolve their heightened need for system justification, as the effect of system threat dissipated once participants had been given the chance to express their separate spheres ideology
We have presented the separate spheres ideology as a psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalized the SSI with a new scale measure, and modeled the SSI as a predictor of important outcomes related to gender discrimination and inequality in society
Summary
For more than a decade, the dominant social-psychological approach to studying gendered workplace inequality and discrimination has been to investigate the role of descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes (e.g., [1]). Existing individual-difference measures of gender attitudes in social psychology have inspired our research on the separate spheres ideology Each of these measures addresses concepts that are somewhat related to the SSI or downstream consequences, but none of them captures the construct of interest here—the notion that men and women naturally fit in different domains of society and should be restricted to these domains. When conducting experiments of specific, targeted hypotheses (as opposed to a large survey meant to provide data for many different studies), it is easier to ask participants to complete an entire scale For all of these reasons, sociology and political science survey items that measure gender ideology are useful for some purposes, but they are not useful for psychologists hoping to examine the psychological antecedents, processes, and consequences of the SSI. We examined the extent to which the SSI predicts opposition to workplace flexibility policies above and beyond the effects of existing measures of gender attitudes
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