It has been argued that gender essentialism impedes progress towards greater gender equality. Here we present a new gender essentialism scale (GES), and validate it in two large nationally representative samples from Denmark and Australia. In both samples the GES was highly reliable and predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and support for gender discrimination, as well as perceived fairness of gender-based treatment in the Australian sample, independently of two established predictors (i.e., social dominance orientation and conservative political orientation). In addition, gender essentialism assessed by the GES moderated some manifestations of the backlash effect: high essentialists were more likely to respond negatively towards a power-seeking female political candidate relative to a male candidate. Given the implications for possible workplace interventions, further work could usefully explore whether gender essentialism moderates other well-established forms of gender bias.

Many forms of social interaction require that behaviour be coordinated in the here and now. Much research has been conducted on how people coordinate their actions in real time to achieve a joint goal, showing that people use both synchronised (i.e., symmetric) and complementary (i.e., asymmetric) strategies. These two mechanisms have been mostly studied independently, the former in the context of rhythmic tasks, and the latter in non-rhythmic tasks. However, people often balance these two strategies in real-life social interactions, in order to achieve a joint goal more effectively. Here, our aim was to investigate how people may implicitly balance synchronisation and complementarity in a continuous joint aiming task. We asked dyads to synchronise the timing of their clicks between targets, while changing task constraints for one member of the dyad (i.e., different task difficulties) to asymmetrically perturb the continuous interaction. This allowed us to investigate how individuals implicitly negotiate complementary leader-follower dynamics to achieve synchronisation. We found that dyads flexibly switch from mutual to asymmetric adaptation given variations in task constraints. Specifically, our results show that both members adapt equally up to a certain level of difficulty; after this point, the partner with the difficult task becomes less adaptive, and hence more of a leader, while the adaptability of the member with the easier task remains unchanged. This proves to be an effective strategy in this asymmetric task, as people synchronise better with an irregular, but adaptive partner, than with a completely predictable, but non-responsive metronome. These results show that given asymmetric task constraints, adaptability, rather than predictability, facilitates coordination.

We designed this study to measure the degree of backlash a specific Danish university would encounter in response to gender equity interventions. To capture this resistance we used two standardized questionnaires: the Modern Sexism Scale, which measures explicit denial of gender discrimination and resentment towards gender equity demands (such as gender interventions) andthe Support for Discriminatory Practices which measures peoples explicit preferences for hiring men over women. We also asked an open question about attitudes towards the university’s current gender policies. The questionnaire was sent to 15,493 employees. With one prompt 1,805 completed the entire questionnaire. We found that university employees scored above the midpoint on modern sexism, indicating that, on average, they held sexist attitudes. We further showed that modern sexism scores varied depending on beliefs about what was being done forgender equity in the organization, such that those who thought that enough or too much was being done had significantly higher sexism scores than those who thought that not enough wasbeing done. Over all, our findings document explicit sexist attitudes within the target university and suggest that gender equity interventions are therefore likely to be met by great resistancefrom some.

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We explore the relationship between academic employees' attitudes to modern sexism and the #MeToo movement to better understand how interventions designed to address sexual harassment might be received in Danish academia. Using a survey of employees at a large Danish university (N = 1128), we categorized employees' open answers about their attitudes to the #MeToo Movement as (a) positive, (b) ambivalent, or (c) negative. These categories were associated with employees' modern sexism scores, such that those higher in modern sexism were more likely to be negative about the movement, while those with lower scores were more likely to be positive. To better understand possible sources of resistance to policy interventions, we used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to analyse the open comments for themes related to employee's negative attitudes towards #MeToo. The two most prominent themes were: (1) delegitimisation of the purposes of the movement, and (2) perception that the rights of potential sexual perpetrators were more important than those of potential victims. We discuss the implications for the implementation of interventions targeting sexual harassment.