A new study led by Paul Connor, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, finds that Americans have an implicit bias in favor of women.
According to the American Psychological Association,”implicit bias is a negative attitude, of which one is not consciously aware, against a specific social group. Implicit bias is thought to be shaped by experience and based on learned associations between particular qualities and social categories, including race and/or gender. Individuals’ perceptions and behaviors can be influenced by the implicit biases they hold, even if they are unaware they hold such biases.”
The authors investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age by showing words and images to more than 5,000 test subjects who were asked to rate what they see as good or bad or positive and negative. Researchers measure not only the responses but the time it takes respondents to come to a decision. In these experiments, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias.
Dr. Connor told Salon that “Although people have very strong gender stereotypes, I think that it’s probably true that people do generally think women are better than men. Men commit most of the crime in society, men can be most of the violence. In all our art and literature, the villains are almost always men. Most of history’s atrocities have been committed by men. I think it’s not altogether that surprising that if implicit bias does function as this relatively automatic threat detection mechanism, that we may have evolved to respond very quickly to perceived threats in our environment. It’s really not surprising that we would have relatively automatic negative associations with men — and relatively positive associations with women.”
The full study, “Intersectional Implicit Bias: Evidence for Asymmetrically Compounding Bias and the Predominance of Target Gender,” was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It may be accessed here.
The idea of women being viewed as better in the way assessed here is not new. There is a theory of ambivalent sexism in which women may be viewed quite positively when conforming to the ideal of good, innocent, kind, dutiful, maternal, and peaceful (benevolent sexism). There is research documenting that this bias can actually perpetuate inequities women experience as it confines them to certain scripts/roles. Thus, although this can sound like women are viewed more positively, that perspective comes with restrictive scripts. I somewhat hoped that WIA would consider the broader implications when reporting this (even if JPSP did not).