Influence of professional status on perceptions of romantic relationship dynamics.

Abstract

Men and women who violate traditional expectations with regard to professional status are perceived negatively by others, and can face negative outcomes in the workplace. Here we examine whether these negative perceptions extend to observers' evaluations of status violators' intimate relation ships. We employed a fictional scenario depicting a heterosexual married couple, manipulating the professional status of each character while holding all other information constant. Participants (N = 396) projected lower relationship satisfaction onto the husband when he had lower professional status than his wife (nontraditional condition). Participants in this condition also liked and sympa thized with the wife less, and perceived her as having more power in the relationship than her husband. Finally, these effects were mediated by ratings of the characters on perceived normative masculinity/femininity. These findings contribute to existing research on the penalties that both male and female gender role violators face, suggesting additional consequences for outsiders' perceptions of their intimate relationships.The 2010 Dodge Charger Super Bowl ad reflected a growing rhetorical shift in the war between the sexes. In several quick vignettes, we glimpse into the lives of four men on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Brow-beaten by their female partners' demands that they contribute to the housework and compromise their masculinity by carrying lip balm, they take refuge in their choice of vehicle, the Charger: "Man's Last Stand." Flowever, the second vignette calls into question how much of the men's apparent suffocation truly stems from their relationships: "I will be at work by 8 a.m.; I will sit through 2-hr meetings; I will say yes when you want me to say yes; I will be quiet when you don't want to hear me say no." Perhaps the root of these men's seeming distress is a lack of professional power, and the ad's characterization of the men's relationships as unsatisfying and their partners as controlling is merely a convenient (and possi bly reflexive) foil. Here, we examine whether men lower in professional status are, in fact, viewed by perceivers as rela tively dissatisfied with their relationships.In the months surrounding the ad's release, articles flooded the media projecting "the death of macho" (Salam, 2009) and announcing the "end of men" (Rosin, 2010). Indeed, there seems to be an ever-increasing perception that women are outstripping men professionally, and usurping men's position

Engendering support: Hostile sexism predicts voting for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election

“…More generally, people have a stronger tendency to associate careers or leadership with men as compared to women (e.g., Koenig, Eagly, Mitchell, & Ristikari, 2011; Rudman & Killianski, 2000), and prefer that men occupy higher status roles than women (Hettinger, Hutchinson, & Bosson, 2014). The consequences of violating these expectations may be politically pernicious for women as backlash penalizes women (but not men) candidates for their power-seeking intentions (Okimoto & Brescoll, 2010).…”

Who brings home the bacon?

“…shows that men and women violating gender norms in the relationship domain also face negative evaluations (MacInnis & Baliga, 2019;Hettinger, Hutchinson, & Bosson, 2014). In two studies we show that the backlash as has been found in the work domain also provide an explanation why people negatively evaluate men and women who break with gender norms in the relationship domain.…”

“…Cross-class couples in which women earn more, are more highly educated or have a higher status occupation than the man were viewed negatively by others (MacInnis & Baliga, 2019). Compared to people in traditional relationships, in couples where the man has a lower status occupation than his female partner, people predict the male partner to be less satisfied with the relationship and report less sympathy with the female partner (Hettinger, Hutchinson, & Bosson, 2014)and can face negative outcomes in the workplace.…”

“…In Chapter 2, I investigate whether backlash mechanisms explain why people often evaluate non-traditional couples more negatively than traditional couples (MacInnis & Bulliga, 2019;Hettinger, Hutchinson, & Bosson, 2014). I hypothesize that women with higher societal status than their partner are perceived to be the dominant and agentic one relative to their partner, whereas men with lower societal status than their partner are perceived to be the weak one relative to their partner.…”

The Danger of Testing by Selecting Controlled Subsets, with Applications to Spoken-Word Recognition

“…When selecting multiple subsets of stimuli to assign to different experimental conditions, researchers often need to control for other relevant variables. For example, to carry out a study on gender stereotyping, Hettinger, Hutchinson, and Bosson (2014) needed to identify two sets of household chores from a longer list—one set to assign to a male character in a story, one to a female character—so that the chosen sets matched on genderedness, pleasantness, difficulty, and time consumption. This approach is used widely in studies of word recognition, the focus of this paper, and has also been used in a variety of other psychological research, including the relationship between race and face perception (Zebrowitz, White, & Wieneke, 2008), between attentional processing and obesity (Carters, Rieger, & Bell, 2015), and between emotion and memory (Schmidt, Patnaik, & Kensinger, 2011), among others.…”