The authors argue that complementary hostile and benevolent components of sexism exist across cultures. Male dominance creates hostile sexism (HS), but men's dependence on women fosters benevolent sexism (BS)--subjectively positive attitudes that put women on a pedestal but reinforce their subordination. Research with 15,000 men and women in 19 nations showed that (a) HS and BS are coherent constructs that correlate positively across nations, but (b) HS predicts the ascription of negative and BS the ascription of positive traits to women, (c) relative to men, women are more likely to reject HS than BS, especially when overall levels of sexism in a culture are high, and (d) national averages on BS and HS predict gender inequality across nations. These results challenge prevailing notions of prejudice as an antipathy in that BS (an affectionate, patronizing ideology) reflects inequality and is a cross-culturally pervasive complement to HS.

Four experiments found benevolent sexism to be worse than hostile sexism for women's cognitive performance. Experiments 1-2 showed effects of paternalist benevolent sexism and ruled out explanations of perceived sexism, context pleasantness, and performance motivation. Experiment 3 showed effects of both paternalist and complementary gender differentiation components of benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism per se (rather than the provision of unsolicited help involved in paternalism) worsened performance. Experiment 4 showed that impaired performance due to benevolent sexism was fully mediated by the mental intrusions women experienced about their sense of competence. Additionally, Experiment 4 showed that gender identification protected against hostile but not benevolent sexism. Despite the apparently positive and inoffensive tone of benevolent sexism, our research emphasizes its insidious dangers.Keywords: benevolent and hostile sexism, discrimination, performance and working memory, ingroup identification, sense of competence Sexism is expressed in a variety of ways, some more subtle than others and some more hostile than others. Examples of this attitude are gender-related humor, sexist name-calling, sexual harassment, and employment discrimination. Gender discrimination, like any other type of discrimination, is less and less accepted in our modern societies, and legislation has been designed to promote gender equality. In Europe, for instance, Article 141 of the European Commission's treaty states that any job classification system that is used for determining pay must be based on the same criteria for both men and women and be so written as to exclude any sex discrimination. Nonetheless, even if obvious forms of sexism are often socially condemned, more subtle forms of sexism are not. Worse, they sometimes are promoted, as they may sound positive in tone or even seem gallant or chivalrous. Consider, for instance, a man helping a woman to carry luggage, paying for her meal at a restaurant, or complimenting her caring abilities. One might ask what is wrong with that. The problem is that people do not notice that these behaviors may be threatening. These kinds of behavior might, however, be expressions of paternalism or else might ambivalently flatter women while simultaneously implicitly suggesting their inferiority. Paternalism suggests that men should take responsibility for the welfare of women, who might not be able to carry luggage by themselves, might not earn enough money to pay at the restaurant, and should be remembered for their qualities (warmth) rather than their weak points (competence). In this article, we propose that paternalism as well as the other aspects of benevolent sexism, by suggesting women's lack of ability, are devastating to women's performance. Sexism Versus PatronizingHostile and benevolent sexism often go hand in hand and result in ambivalent attitudes toward women (Glick & Fiske, 1996. Hostile sexism is an obviously antagonistic attitude toward women, who are often viewed as t...

The present study investigated how benevolent (BS) and hostile sexism (HS) shift women's self-construal and autobiographical memory. Belgian undergraduates (only women, N=45, mean age=21.8) were confronted either by BS, HS or neutral comments in the context of a job interview. After performing a cognitive task, participants reported the intrusive thoughts that came to their mind during the task. Later, autobiographical memory for self-incompetence was assessed. Performance response latencies were slower after BS than HS. Also, BS generated more disturbing mental intrusions related to the idea of being incompetent than HS. Autobiographical memory similarly indicated greater access for incompetence after BS. Although HS was more aggressive in tone, it did not shift women's self-construal and autobiographical memories toward incompetence.

Glick and Fiske's (1996) Ambivalent Sexism Inventory is a measure of hostile sexism (sexist antipathy) and benevolent sexism (a subjectively positive attitude toward women). This paper proposes a French version of this scale, the Échelle de Sexisme Ambivalent (ESA). Three studies on more than 1 000 participants established the validity of this new scale. The first one is the application of Rasch's extended model that confirmed the psychometrical qualities of the ESA, for both male and female participants. The second study established the structural and predictive validity in a covariance analysis. This study again showed that both male and female participants displayed the same structural pattern. Next, both discriminant and convergent validity were assessed, by comparison to the Neosexism Scale (Tougas, Brown, Beaton and Joly, 1995) and the Social Dominance Scale (Sidanius and Pratto, 1999). Finally, practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

The authors propose that when testing a hypothesis about a personality trait of another person, a preference for questions that match the hypothesis is a manifestation of a social skill. If so, socially skilled people should request matching questions when the context stresses their relevance. On the contrary, less skilled people should be relatively insensitive to this environmental cue. To test this pragmatic stance, participants varying in self-monitoring sought information to validate an introvert or an extrovert hypothesis concerning a high-or equal-status interviewee. As predicted, only high self-monitors in the high-status-interviewee context showed a preference for matching questions. Moreover, the preference was stronger for not rejecting than for accepting these matching questions. Results are discussed in light of a pragmatic perspective that points out the adaptive and socially useful value of what look like errors and biases from a strictly rationalist perspective.