Everyday Sexism: Evidence for Its Incidence, Nature, and Psychological Impact From Three Daily Diary Studies

Abstract

Three daily diary studies were conducted to examine the incidence, nature, and impact of everyday sexism as reported by college women and men. Women experienced about one to two impactful sexist incidents per week, consisting of traditional gender role stereotypes and prejudice, demeaning and degrading comments and behaviors, and sexual objectification. These incidents affected women's psychological well-being by decreasing their comfort, increasing their feelings of anger and depression, and decreasing their state self-esteem. Although the experiences had similar effects on men's anger, depression, and state self-esteem, men reported relatively fewer sexist incidents, suggesting less overall impact on men. The results provide evidence for the phenomena of everyday prejudice and enlighten our understanding of the experience of prejudice in interpersonal encounters from the perspective of the target.*We would like to thank Mathilda du Toit for her help with the analyses.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder: An Initial Investigation of the Effects of Alcohol, Attractiveness, Warmth, and Competence on the Objectifying Gaze in Men

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Moderating effects of three coping strategies and self-esteem on perceived discrimination and depressive symptoms: A minority stress model for Asian international students.

“…Future studies may also want to include a daily diary method of assessing experiences of racial discrimination in order to reduce the errors associated with retrospective reports. For example, Swim, Hyers, Cohen, and Ferguson (2001) used a daily diary method to study women's experiences of gender discrimination. Moreover, the current results showed that students who had lived in the United States for a longer period of time reported higher levels of perceived discrimination.…”

Predictors of HIV-related stigma among young people living with HIV.

“…and their negative sequelae (i.e., emotional distress), based on conceptualizations of stigma as a stressor (see Miller & Kaiser, 2001). The link between emotional distress and stigmatizing events, as well as support for the hypothesis that discriminating events cause distress, has been documented in empirical studies on gender and race/ethnicity based stigma (Landrine, Klonoff, Gibbs, Manning, Lund, 1995;Landrine & Klonoff, 1996;Swim, 2001). Several empirical studies among PLH have documented the association between HIV-stigma and depression (Lee, Kochman, Sikkema, 2002;Lichtenstein, Laska, & Claire, 2002;Crandall & Coleman, 2002;Laryea & Gien, 1993;Berger, Ferrans, & Lashley, 2001), as well as anxiety, alienation, social conflict, and poor social support (Berger et al, 2001).…”