American Men’s and Women’s Beliefs about Gender Discrimination: For Men, It’s Not Quite a Zero-Sum Game

Abstract

We surveyed Americans regarding their beliefs about gender discrimination over the past several decades. Men and women agreed that women faced much more discrimination than men in the past, and they agreed that the discrimination gap between men and women has narrowed in recent years. However, men perceived the gap as narrower than women did at all time periods, and reported that there is little difference today in the amount of gender discrimination women and men face. Political ideology moderated these beliefs such that conservative men were most likely to report that anti-Man bias now equals or exceeds anti-Woman bias. Similar to recent research on beliefs about racism, these findings suggest that groups which differ historically in status and power exhibit perceptual differences regarding the changing nature of discrimination.

Is LGBT progress seen as an attack on Christians?: Examining Christian/sexual orientation zero-sum beliefs.

“…We aimed to collect data from approximately 300 participants, evenly split between cishet Christians (referred to in this study as Christians for simplicity), non-Christians LGBT individuals (referred to as LGBT), and cishet non-Christians (referred to as non-Christians). This sample goal was consistent with previous work that collected samples of 100 participants per demographic group 1 (Bosson et al, 2012;Wilkins et al, 2015) and included some oversampling because we assumed some would fail manipulation checks. After removing data from individuals who failed checks, 316 participants remained.…”

“…Participants first reported the degree to which they believed that LGBT individuals and then Christians (on a separate screen) were (or would be) victims of discrimination in every decade between the 1950s and 2020s (using a 1–10 scale, anchored at not at all and very much , see Bosson et al, 2012; Kehn & Ruthig, 2013; Norton & Sommers, 2011). Next, participants completed the dependent measures described below (on a 1–7 scale anchored at strongly disagree and strongly agree ).…”

“…For all analyses, we controlled for political orientation (see Wilkins et al, 2015 for use of this covariate) because political orientation predicts perceptions of discrimination, and gender and racial zero-sum beliefs (Bosson et al, 2012; Wilkins et al, 2015). In addition, greater conservatism is associated both with greater prejudice against sexual minorities and with religiosity among predominantly Christian respondents (van der Toorn et al, 2017).…”

“…Previous research on zero-sum beliefs has examined attitudes among groups that vary on the same demographic dimension (i.e., race, gender, nationality) and that are widely perceived as being mutually exclusive (e.g., Bosson et al, 2012;Esses et al, 1998Esses et al, , 2001Meegan, 2010;Sherif & Sherif, 1969;Wilkins et al, 2015). For example, within race, Whites endorse racial zero-sum beliefs about the bias they experience relative to Blacks (Norton & Sommers, 2011;Wilkins et al, 2015).…”

“…For example, within race, Whites endorse racial zero-sum beliefs about the bias they experience relative to Blacks (Norton & Sommers, 2011;Wilkins et al, 2015). Within gender, men tend to perceive a zero-sum relationship about the bias they experience relative to women (Bosson et al, 2012;Kehn & Ruthig, 2013;Kuchynka et al, 2018;Wilkins et al, 2015). Native-born Canadians also perceive themselves as being in a zero-sum competition with immigrants (Esses et al, 1998(Esses et al, , 2001.…”