Intersectional Stereotyping Research Articles

The Weight of It All

Abstract Sociologists often interpret racial differences in help-seeking behavior in the United States as stemming from differences in cultural capital, an implication being that those who hesitate to seek help lack understanding of how important it is for success. In this paper, we draw on the work of W. E. B Du Bois and research on gender and racial stereotypes to show that it is not a lack of understanding about the importance of help-seeking, but rather, Black women’s double consciousness that underlies their reluctance to seek help relative to White women. Through twenty-nine in-depth interviews with Black and White college-aged women, we investigate how they make meaning of two competing ideals: the need to be seen as a strong woman and the need for help and social support. We identify a discourse around gender stereotypes for White participants and intersectional stereotypes for Black participants. Where Black and White women experience a consciousness born out of their marginalization relative to men, comparing how they differently navigate stereotypes about strong women reveals the analytic power of Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. First, the “veil” reveals the racialized gender stereotypes Black women worry they might confirm by seeking help. Second, Black women’s sense of “twoness” means they more often than White women saw their help-seeking behaviors as reflecting negatively on their broader community. Finally, consistent with Du Bois’s point that “second sight” brings awareness but not liberation, we find that even though Black women were hyperaware of the disadvantages of not seeking help, they tended more often than White women to reach a breaking point before seeking it.

Competence Perceptions at the Intersection of Gender and Race-Ethnicity

Competence perceptions represent a fundamental dimension of human perception and have wide-ranging consequences for social interaction. Therefore, it is no surprise that multiple prominent social psychological theories emphasize the role of competence perceptions. We know that both a person’s gender and race-ethnicity influence assumptions about their competence, but we have only a few studies examining the intersections of these factors. Using a large survey experiment (N = 1,219), I examine competence perceptions at the intersection of 2 gender and 13 racial-ethnic categories. Results show large effects of both gender and race-ethnicity and also highly intersectional stereotypes; that is, there is no one overarching effect of gender or race-ethnicity but instead contingent effects. By oversampling racial-ethnic minorities, I also test the assumption of consensus for competence perceptions. Results show highly consensual perceptions, suggesting we all recognize society’s stereotypes even if we do not agree with them.

Operationalization of (Trans)gender in Facial Recognition Systems: From Binarism to Intersectionality

ABSTRACTIn a paper published in 2018, Os Keyes investigated how the literature on Automated Gender Recognition systems (AGRs) conceived gender, finding that 94.8% of the papers treated it as binary, 72.4% as immutable and 60.3% as a physiological component. In the author's view, this is indicative of an operationalization of gender, that is, the assumption that the latter is a discrete and objectively applicable parameter. Keyes claims that such a vision is blind to the performative aspects of gender and particularly dangerous for transgender people. Here I will follow on these remarks, providing several examples that show how AGR systems' failures in recognizing the faces of transgender people are capable of both perpetuating and amplifying gender stereotypes and inequalities. Then, I will introduce the notion of intersectionality, which is the idea that humans ‘sit at the crossroads’ of many physical, social, and political factors, whose combination generates dynamics of discrimination or privilege. I will focus on a subfield of intersectional studies, that is, intersectional stereotyping, which explains how we usually make assumptions and judgments about an individual or group of people based on multiple social identities or categories they belong to, such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion and ability. I will argue that this area of research provides us with a set of knowledge that might help us rethink and redesign the data sets for AGR. Specifically, I will draw on three key notions of intersectional stereotyping—‘perceiver goals’, ‘category accessibility’ and ‘category fit’—and use them to envision new ways of collecting images for assessing gender through facial recognition. Finally, I will explicate why my observations call for an urgent integration between computer science and gender studies.

Extracting intersectional stereotypes from embeddings: Developing and validating the Flexible Intersectional Stereotype Extraction procedure.

Social group-based identities intersect. The meaning of "woman" is modulated by adding social class as in "rich woman" or "poor woman." How does such intersectionality operate at-scale in everyday language? Which intersections dominate (are most frequent)? What qualities (positivity, competence, warmth) are ascribed to each intersection? In this study, we make it possible to address such questions by developing a stepwise procedure, Flexible Intersectional Stereotype Extraction (FISE), applied to word embeddings (GloVe; BERT) trained on billions of words of English Internet text, revealing insights into intersectional stereotypes. First, applying FISE to occupation stereotypes across intersections of gender, race, and class showed alignment with ground-truth data on occupation demographics, providing initial validation. Second, applying FISE to trait adjectives showed strong androcentrism (Men) and ethnocentrism (White) in dominating everyday English language (e.g. White + Men are associated with 59% of traits; Black + Women with 5%). Associated traits also revealed intersectional differences: advantaged intersectional groups, especially intersections involving Rich, had more common, positive, warm, competent, and dominant trait associates. Together, the empirical insights from FISE illustrate its utility for transparently and efficiently quantifying intersectional stereotypes in existing large text corpora, with potential to expand intersectionality research across unprecedented time and place. This project further sets up the infrastructure necessary to pursue new research on the emergent properties of intersectional identities.

Intersectional Stereotypes: Research, Summary and Outlook

With the concern for social justice, more and more disciplines are focusing on and studying intersectional stereotypes and calling for as much attention and protection of the rights and fair treatment of different groups as possible. However, as an interdisciplinary field, the findings of intersectional stereotypes lack a system and are more difficult to integrate. This paper aims to collect the existing scientific findings, outline the existing research directions and look into the future. The article first reviews the definition and origin of intersectional stereotype, then summarizes the existing research and divides it into two parts, focusing on whether intersectional stereotype exists in different factors and scenarios, and how intersectional stereotype is formed. As the scope of intersectionality research in academia expands and deepens, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion and development of the field by summarizing existing knowledge and focusing on emerging research directions and themes, and also appealing attention to groups that are negatively affected by intersection stereotypes and implicit discrimination.

A Race-Based Size Bias for Black Adolescent Boys: Size, Innocence, and Threat.

We adopted an intersectional stereotyping lens to investigate whether race-based size bias-the tendency to judge Black men as larger than White men-extends to adolescents. Participants judged Black boys as taller than White boys, despite no real size differences (Studies 1A and 1B), and even when boys were matched in age (Study 1B). The size bias persisted when participants viewed computer-generated faces that varied only in apparent race (Study 2A) and extended to perceptions of physical strength, with Black boys judged as stronger than White boys (Study 2B). The size bias was associated with threat-related perceptions, including beliefs that Black boys were less innocent than White boys (Study 3). Finally, the size bias was moderated by a valid threat signal (i.e., anger expressions, Studies 4A and 4B). Thus, adult-like threat stereotypes are perpetrated upon Black boys, leading them to be erroneously perceived as more physically formidable than White boys.

Is Men's Heterosexuality Perceived as More Precarious Than Women's? An Intersectional, Race-by-Gender Analysis.

People perceive men's masculinity to be more precarious, or easier to lose, than women's femininity. In the present article, we investigated (a) whether men's heterosexuality is likewise perceived to be more precarious than women's, and if so, (b) whether this effect is exaggerated when the targets in question are Black rather than White. To investigate these questions, we conducted three experiments (one of which was conducted on a probability-based sample of U.S. adults; total N = 3,811) in which participants read about a target person who either did or did not engage in a single same-sex sexual behavior. Results revealed that participants questioned the heterosexuality of men more than the heterosexuality of women when they engaged (vs. did not engage) in same-sex sexual behavior. Surprisingly, these effects were not moderated by whether targets were Black versus White. Results are interpreted in light of recent models of intersectional stereotyping.

"Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping": Correction to Petsko et al. (2022).

Reports an error in "Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping" by Christopher D. Petsko, Ashleigh Shelby Rosette and Galen V. Bodenhausen (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Jan 13, 2022, np). In the article, a coding error that impacted the results of Experiments 2a and 2b has been corrected, and the supplemental material and Figures 3 and 4 have also been updated. All versions of this article have been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2022-20006-001.) A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds-identity-specific schemas for categorizing others-and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Through the looking glass: A lens-based account of intersectional stereotyping.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 123(4) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2023-02979-003). In the article, a coding error that impacted the results of Experiments 2a and 2b has been corrected, and the supplemental material and Figures 3 and 4 have also been updated. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A growing body of scholarship documents the intersectional nature of social stereotyping, with stereotype content being shaped by a target person's multiple social identities. However, conflicting findings in this literature highlight the need for a broader theoretical integration. For example, although there are contexts in which perceivers stereotype gay Black men and heterosexual Black men in very different ways, so too are there contexts in which perceivers stereotype these men in very similar ways. We develop and test an explanation for contradictory findings of this sort. In particular, we argue that perceivers have a repertoire of lenses in their minds-identity-specific schemas for categorizing others-and that characteristics of the perceiver and the social context determine which one of these lenses will be used to organize social perception. Perceivers who are using the lens of race, for example, are expected to attend to targets' racial identities so strongly that they barely attend, in these moments, to targets' other identities (e.g., their sexual orientations). Across six experiments, we show (a) that perceivers tend to use just one lens at a time when thinking about others, (b) that the lenses perceivers use can be singular and simplistic (e.g., the lens of gender by itself) or intersectional and complex (e.g., a race-by-gender lens, specifically), and (c) that different lenses can prescribe categorically distinct sets of stereotypes that perceivers use as frameworks for thinking about others. This lens-based account can resolve apparent contradictions in the literature on intersectional stereotyping, and it can likewise be used to generate novel hypotheses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

We Are Not the Same: Intersectionality and Inequity in Organizations

In this symposium, we demonstrate the importance of an intersectional lens in understanding inequity in organizations. How people experience and navigate organizations is unlikely to be singularly determined by one aspect of their identity. Rather, people are multifaceted, belonging to a number of identity groups, and more nuanced theory in diversity, equity, and inclusion aids in better understanding organizational behavior in light of this reality. Across four presentations highlighting the intersections of ethnicity, gender, and status, we demonstrate how inequity persists in organizations and the need for more intersectional theories in management scholarship. The Importance of Intersectionality for Understanding the Use and Reception of Dominant Language Presenter: Cydney Dupree; Yale School of Management Growing Apart: Hair-based Stigma and Racial Segregation in America’s Institutions Presenter: Tosen Nwadei; Emory U., Goizueta Business School White liberals downshift warmth to high (vs. low) status Black partners Presenter: Arielle Lewis; Emory U. Intersectional Stereotypes as a Function of Intergroup Contrast: Implications for Hiring Decisions Presenter: Christopher Petsko; Kenan-Flagler Business School, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Supplemental Material for Through the Looking Glass: A Lens-Based Account of Intersectional Stereotyping

Supplemental Material for Through the Looking Glass: A Lens-Based Account of Intersectional Stereotyping

Intersectional Stereotyping in Media Coverage: The Case of Stacey Abrams Versus Stacey Evans in Georgia

ABSTRACT Research on race and gender in the media finds that stereotypes often influence the type of coverage that women and minority candidates receive during campaigns. However, much less is known about the specific stereotypes that women candidates of color face in the media. To understand the challenges and opportunities that women candidates of color encounter, political scientists must take a closer look at the way they are portrayed in the news. As a first step, I conduct a content analysis of Georgia’s 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary, comparing the stereotypes used in campaign coverage of the two candidates – Stacey Abrams and Stacey Evans. I find that newspaper coverage of Stacey Abrams contained many more references to agentic stereotypes, like assertiveness, than coverage of Stacey Evans. Moreover, I find that agentic traits are more likely to be negative when applied to Stacey Abrams than to Stacey Evans.

Triple dissonance: women-led funds. With a gender lens. In Africa.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to current debates in the field of entrepreneurship on the persistent gender gap in capital allocation to entrepreneurs. Drawing on recent theories of entrepreneurial belonging (Stead, V. 2017. “Belonging and Women Entrepreneurs: Women’s Navigation of Gendered Assumptions in Entrepreneurial Practice.” International Small Business Journal 35 (1): 61–77. doi:10.1177/0266242615594413; Birkner, S. 2020. “To Belong or Not to Belong, That Is the Question?! Explorative Insights on Liminal Gender States within Women’s STEMpreneurship.” International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal 16: 115–136. doi:10.1007/s11365-019-00605-5), we conducted narrative research to gain rare insights into the gendered challenges faced by female fund managers in private equity in Sub-Saharan Africa during the fundraising process. We discover a triple dissonance between the feminine normative frames of womanhood and the male normative frames of entrepreneurship and private equity, compounded by intersectional stereotypes of Africa. Our research offers novel, exploratory insights into what has been a blind spot in the emerging field of gender-lens investing: how gender bias in capital allocation to entrepreneurs is reinforced by gender bias in capital allocation to fund managers. We conclude that the field must move beyond viewing African women as beneficiaries of empowerment and put them in power of investment decisions.

On Intersectionality: How Complex Patterns of Discrimination Can Emerge From Simple Stereotypes

Patterns of discrimination are often complex (i.e., multiplicative), with different identities combining to yield especially potent discrimination. For example, Black men are disproportionately stopped by police to a degree that cannot be explained by the simple (i.e., additive) effects of being Black and being male. Researchers often posit corresponding mental representations (e.g., intersectional stereotypes for Black men) to account for these complex outcomes. We suggest that complex discrimination can be explained by simple stereotypes combined with threshold models of behavior—for example, “if someone’s threat level seems higher than X, stop that person.” Simulations provide proof of this concept. We show how gender-by-race discrimination in both promotions and police stops can be explained by simple stereotypes. We also explore race-by-age discrimination in police stops, in which racial disparities are greater for young adolescents. This work suggests that complex behaviors can sometimes arise from relatively simple cognitions.

"Mischievous Uncles" as Rule Breakers: Intersectional Stereotypes and Risk Perceptions During the Coronavirus Pandemic in Turkey.

Responses to crises can highlight and exacerbate class inequalities. Seemingly neutral policy measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic that aim to protect high-risk groups can lead to a shift in the public discourse that deprives citizens of their agency based not only on their age but also their class. In this article, we focus on the case of Turkey, one of the countries with the fastest growth of novel coronavirus cases in late March 2020, where the government introduced a curfew for people over the age of 65, while actively encouraging the rest of the working-age population to stay at home. An intersectional analysis of the Twitter campaign #StayatHome (#EvdeKal) and the media outlets’ news coverage of the policy implementation show that both platforms circulated human-interest stories of working-class men who defy the curfew predominantly. Both the stories and Twitter user comments often defined the subjects of those stories as rule-breakers and, therefore, as “mischievous uncles.” They became the scapegoats, while upper and middle classes avoided the label. These findings have implications for the framing of policy outcomes and welfare provisions as well as oppositional politics that push for the expansion of labor protections during the pandemic.

Intersectional stereotyping in policing: an analysis of traffic stop outcomes

ABSTRACT Identity-based stereotyping often operates on perceptions about the intersection of multiple identities. Intersectional stereotyping predicts that certain combinations of attributes lend themselves more readily to perceived suspicion than others. In this paper, I test the way that suspicion-evoking stereotypes affect police-citizen interactions. Through the use of traffic stop data from Illinois spanning ten years and amounting to more than 20 million observations, I am able to produce accurate estimates for the relative degree of targeting that individual drivers face based on their racial, gender, age, and class-based perceived identities. Overall, I find both theoretical and methodological support for the necessity of intersectional analyses of identity-based profiling.

Multifarious person perception: How social perceivers manage the complexity of intersectional targets

AbstractStereotyping plays an important role in how we perceive the members of social groups. Yet stereotyping is complicated by the fact that every individual simultaneously belongs to multiple social groups. For example, the stereotypes that are called to mind about a Black individual can vary depending on that person's age, gender, and sexual orientation. This phenomenon—termed intersectional stereotyping—has recently inspired a variety of intriguing research findings. But these research findings pose challenges for prevalent theories of stereotyping. These prevalent theories tend to argue either that (a) perceivers inevitably attend to certain social identities (e.g., gender) when stereotyping intersectional targets, or that (b) perceivers inevitably attend to all detectable social identities at once. In contrast to these perspectives, we argue that perceivers generally attend to just one social identity (or one intersection of identities) at a time when stereotyping intersectional targets, as a function of the social context. For example, gay Black men can be alternately stereotyped as gay people, as Black people, as men, or as gay Black men specifically. The approach described here can account for a diverse array of findings emerging from research on intersectional stereotyping. Moreover, by specifying the factors that render particular identities salient in the minds of social perceivers, this approach offers clear and falsifiable predictions regarding the situated stereotyping of multifaceted individuals.

Anti-Muslim racism and the racialisation of sexual violence: ‘intersectional stereotyping’ in mass media representations of male Muslim migrants in Germany

ABSTRACTThis article examines how German print media have represented male migrants with Muslim backgrounds in relation to mainstream society and the stereotypes drawn on and created, including that of the migrant Muslim man as a criminal and sexual perpetrator. Media reports about ‘lecherous refugees’ have risen in the wake of wider social controversies about the ‘European refugee crisis’ and the consequences of welcoming over 1.5 million refugees from predominantly Muslim countries into Germany in recent years. Many of these reports reflect the Cologne New Year’s Eve 2016 sexual attacks by migrant men against German women. This study of German print media identifies a racialisation and ‘islamicisation’ of sexual violence and proposes the original theoretical concept of intersectional stereotyping to conceptualise the intersecting of religious, racialised and gendered patterns in media representations of male Muslim migrants. The research combines and extends the analytical frameworks of intersectionality and stereotyping to develop a new concept useful in media studies and beyond. The article provides a previously unexplored insight into racialised anti-Muslim stereotyping in German society in socio-political and historical context through the lens of print media.

The Role of Intersectional Stereotypes on Evaluations of Gay and Lesbian Political Candidates

Social scientists are increasingly taking a more complex theoretical approach to the role of stereotyping in the electorate's evaluation of political candidates. Within this literature, most studies investigate the impact of one stereotype on the public's evaluation of candidates from an underrepresented group. We build on and extend this literature by exploring what we term “intersectional stereotyping”: The role of stereotypes in shaping the electorate's evaluation of political candidates who share dual membership in stigmatized groups—women and sexual minorities. We empirically examine the impact of intersectional stereotyping in a unique 2003 survey of national adults. Our results indicate that gender, both of the respondent and the candidate, plays a key role in shaping attitudes toward gay and lesbian political candidates. These findings suggest that intersectional stereotyping plays a nuanced role in evaluations of candidates; in certain contexts gender stereotypes are more significant, and at other times stereotypes about sexual minorities appear to be driving evaluations of candidates.

"The Fault, Dear Brutus": Women as Congressional Candidates in Pennsylvania

"The Fault, Dear Brutus": Women as Congressional Candidates in Pennsylvania