Joyce Ho
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
UROP Fellowship: Women and Gender Summer Fellowship Program
Research Mentor(s): Tangier Davis, PhD Candidate, MA
School of Psychology
Presentation Date: Monday, July 27, 2020 | Session 1 | Presenter: 2
Authors: Joyce Ho, Tangier Davis, Isis Settles
Abstract
Social dominance orientation (SDO) refers to one’s endorsement of relations amongst social groups to be hierarchical in nature, as opposed to egalitarian structure (Pratto et al., 1994). Due to SDO’s central purpose regarding various levels of power and equality amongst groups, it would be helpful to apply the concept to the issue of gender equality, which is the focus of the current study. We administered a survey to 567 undergraduate students from a large, Midwestern institution. Specifically, we were interested in examining how SDO would relate to attitudes of benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism, combined with hostile sexism, make up the concept of ambivalent sexism. Ambivalent sexism dictates the treatment of women based upon seemingly positive or negative attitudes towards women (benevolent being positive and hostile being negative). Benevolent sexism describes the biased treatment of women based on the stereotypes that they need protection, that women are inherently virtuous and caring, and a man is not complete without such a character. While many men and women may view the enactment of benevolent sexism as unproblematic, and even considerate, it can be argued that benevolent sexism enforces patriarchal attitudes that allow social inequality to continue (Glick & Fisk, 2001). We hypothesized that those who score higher on social dominance orientation would also be more likely to endorse benevolent sexism, as they prefer social inequality amongst groups. The results indicated that there is a significant, positive correlation between benevolent sexism and social dominance orientation. Using the understanding of what having a high social dominance orientation score means when defining one’s belief in social roles and behaviors, the results of this study can help us to bring attention to the detrimental effects of benevolent sexism.
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Research Disciplines
Social Sciences
