Women experience more serious relationship problems when male partners endorse hostile sexism

Abstract

Men's hostile sexism promotes aggressive attitudes, motivations and behaviors toward women. Despite the costs these effects should have for women, prior research has failed to test how men's hostile sexism predicts the problems women experience in important domains. We address this oversight by utilizing dyadic data from 363 heterosexual couples to test how male partners’ hostile sexism predicts women's relationship experiences and evaluations. Male partners’ hostile sexism was associated with women experiencing more severe problems across a greater number of domains. Moreover, the areas experienced as most problematic were consistent with the power, dependence, and trust concerns underlying men's hostile sexism, including problems with power dynamics, jealousy, and serious problems involving gender‐role conflict, abuse, infidelity and alcohol/drugs. The greater problems associated with male partners’ hostile sexism predicted more negative relationship evaluations for women. These results demonstrate the importance of examining how men's hostile sexism harms women in important life domains.

Relationship (in)security is central to the sources and outcomes of sexist attitudes

“…Similarly, men who more strongly endorse hostile sexism tend to be less open and self‐protective in relationship‐threatening situations, which ruins the chance to improve problems and instead damages relationships (Overall, Sibley, & Tan, ). Accordingly, men who endorse hostile sexism experience lower relationship satisfaction (Hammond & Overall, ; Sibley & Becker, ) and more serious relationship problems, particularly problems involving power, dependence, and trust (Cross & Overall, ). Thus, resisting partners' influence may help men who endorse hostile sexism feel more independent and protected from the risk of exploitation, but means that they forgo intimacy and growth in their relationships.…”

“…Another key implication of our perspective that (in)security is central to understanding sexism is that the resulting relationship dynamics likely generate self‐fulfilling cycles that reinforce people's endorsement or rejection of sexist attitudes. For instance, the relationship aggression arising from men's hostile sexism produces hostility, dissatisfaction, and lower commitment in female partners (Cross & Overall, ; Overall et al, ), and these partner reactions likely affirm men's beliefs that women cannot be trusted. Conversely, relationship conditions that offer security can attenuate the aggression associated with men's hostile sexism (Cross et al, ; also see Sheppard & Johnson, ), and perhaps will reduce hostile sexism across time.…”

Considering the Effect of Sexism on Psychological Intimate Partner Violence: A Study with Imprisoned Men

“…Collecting information from the other dyad member would allow identification of mutual aggressions (Low, Tiberio, Shortt, Capaldi, & Eddy, 2016) and to explore the role that hostile sexism plays in this process. Examining psychological aggression by the participant's partner, and the impact this aggression has, also will clarify whether the psychological aggression assessed in the current study represents violence victimization as experienced by intimate partners (Cross & Overall, 2018) and allows us to identify the existence of either psychological damage or malingering (Arce, Fariña, & Vilariño, 2015;Vilariño, Amado, Vázquez, & Arce, 2018).…”

Ambivalent sexism and relationship adjustment among young adult couples: An actor-partner interdependence model

“…For instance, hostile sexism predicts greater acceptance of gender income inequality and more negative perceptions of female breadwinners than of women portrayed in traditional roles (Connor & Fiske, 2019; Gaunt, 2013). Other research suggests that hostile sexist attitudes hinder women’s autonomy by being associated with perceptions that men have the right to constrain women’s reproductive choices (Patey et al, 2019; Petterson & Sutton, 2018) and maternal behaviors (Huang et al, 2020) Men who more strongly endorse hostile sexism are reported to be more physically and verbally aggressive toward their partners (e.g., Forbes et al, 2004; Martinez-Pecino & Durán, 2019) and women experience more severe problems in their relationship when their partners more strongly endorse hostile sexism, including jealousy, gender-role conflict, abuse, affairs and addiction (Cross & Overall, 2019). Considering these significant costs for women, the absence of a link between men’s hostile sexism and women’s relationship adjustment in our study is puzzling.…”