Gender Essentialism and Responses to Candidates’ Messages

Abstract

People often form negative attitudes against those who deviate from gender norms. Within the political realm, this has the potential to translate into effects on perceptions of candidate likability and traits. Female candidates who tend to focus on issues stereotypically thought of as feminine are generally more positively evaluated than those who focus on stereotypically masculine domains. The current studies investigate whether these effects vary depending on the extent to which people endorse gender essentialism, which is the tendency to attribute gender differences to relatively more intrinsic, innate, and immutable factors versus believing that gender differences are largely due to cultural and learned factors. Current data with adults across two studies suggest a number of interesting findings: Evaluations of candidates depended on an interaction between respondents’ gender essentialism and whether or not the candidate’s message fit traditional stereotypes. In particular, high essentialist respondents felt significantly more negative toward male candidates with nonstereotypic messages.

Gender essentialism and the mental representation of transgender women and men: A multimethod investigation of stereotype content

“…When a category is essentialized, laypeople believe that members of a category are the same at some fundamental level, and that this fundamental sameness (or shared essence) produces the features associated with the category (Gelman, 2003). There is a sizeable body of evidence suggesting that gender groups are highly essentialized in Western societies (e.g., Fuss, 1989;Haslam et al, 2000;Prentice & Miller, 2006;Rothbart & Taylor, 1992;Smiler & Gelman, 2008;Swigger & Meyer, 2019); in accordance with the dominant cultural model, many believe that women are fundamentally the same, and different from men. Gender is often essentialized based on natural kind beliefs, which center the perceived immutability, stability, and shared features of a given group; these are beliefs about what gender is, and from where gender emerges (Coley et al, 2019;Haslam et al, 2000).…”

“…In the US, individual differences in gender essentialism predict sexism (Lee et al, 2020;Smiler & Gelman, 2008), acceptance of existing gender disparities (Lee et al, 2020), association of gender norms with the self (Coleman & Hong, 2008;Smiler & Gelman, 2008), preference for traditionally gendered others (Swigger & Meyer, 2019;Tinsley et al, 2015), and transprejudice (Axt et al, 2021;Norton & Herek, 2013;Prusaczyk & Hodson, 2020;Rad et al, 2019;Tee & Hegarty, 2006;Wilton et al, 2019). As such, these beliefs may play a noteworthy role in moderating how people ascribe stereotypes to transgender groups.…”

Psychometric properties of the polish updated Illinois rape myth acceptance scale

“…So far there is no direct evidence for the link between the rape myth acceptance and the beliefs concerning the origin of differences between men and women. Nevertheless, some studies demonstrate a link between gender essentialism and various gender-related stereotypes and prejudices, for example ambivalent sexism towards women (Studzińska and Wojciszke 2014), lack of support for women's rights (Skewes et al 2018;Studzińska and Wojciszke 2014;Wilton et al 2018), negative attitudes toward counterstereotypical candidates in election (Swigger and Meyer 2018), transphobia (Broussard and Warner 2018;Ching and Xu 2018;Wilton et al 2018) and perceiving same-gender parenting as unnatural and harmful for children (Pacilli et al 2017). Thus we included also the beliefs concerning the origins of differences between men and women in our analysis.…”

Beliefs on Sexual Violence in the Context of System Justification Theory: The Role of Hostile Sexism and Beliefs in Biological Origins of Gender Differences

“…Because of beliefs related to the idea that members of certain groups have stable traits, members of those groups tend to be perceived through the prism of stereotypes (Bastian & Haslam, 2006;Haslam & Whelan, 2008). There is a link between gender essentialism and various stereotypes and prejudices related to gender, for example sexism (Keller, 2005;Studzińska & Wojciszke, 2014), lack of support for women's rights (Skewes et al, 2018;Studzińska & Wojciszke, 2014;Wilton et al, 2018), negative attitudes toward politicians who do not fit gender stereotypes (Swigger & Meyer, 2018), stereotyped view of same-sex parenting (Pacilli et al, 2017) and transphobia (Broussard & Warner, 2018;Ching & Xu, 2018;Wilton et al, 2018).…”