Burdened and blamed: Empowerment messaging increases attributions of women’s responsibility for gender inequality in the Canadian armed forces.

Abstract

Gender inequality persists in the workplace and especially in male-dominated organizations like the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). One cultural response to gender inequality is empowerment messaging, which entails an optimistic and individualistic focus on women's agency and ability to succeed in life. Although empowerment messaging may seem beneficial on the surface, it has the unintended negative consequence of increasing attributions for women's responsibility for gender inequality. We proposed that this unintended negative consequence generalizes to empowerment messaging concerning women's role in the CAF. In two experiments (total N = 812), one of which was preregistered, results demonstrated that exposure to empowerment messaging in an informational video produced by the CAF directly increased the burden placed on women to solve gender inequality in the CAF and indirectly predicted more blame placed on women for causing gender inequality in the CAF. This research suggests that the CAF should avoid empowerment messaging in its public communications to avoid potential harm to women, especially now when the organization is grappling with the systemic problem of gender inequality. Public Significance StatementEmpowerment messaging seemingly uplifts women by focusing on their agency and ability to succeed. Yet, this research demonstrates that empowerment messaging in an informational video produced by the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) increased perceptions of women's burden for solving and blame for causing gender inequality in the CAF. Thus, organizations should be cautious about using empowerment messaging in their public communications to avoid potential harm to women.