Negative Effects Of Hostile Sexism

The concept of hostile sexism includes negative and aggressive attitudes toward women who are thought to be striving to gain power over men by using their sexuality or feminism. Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, characterizes women as special, pure, and warm individuals who are at the same time weak and in need of protection. These seemingly positive attitudes have negative consequences for women. According to Glick and Fiske (1996, 2001) sexism reinforces traditional gender roles, further suggesting that sexism aimed at women is likely to be ambivalent, including both hostile and benevolent sexism in its view of women. The damaging effects of this is shown in a study conducted on Belgian women, it was found that benevolent sexism had a

greater impact than hostile sexism at imprairing performance on cognitive tasks therefore causing the women to doubt their ability (Dardenne, Dumont & Bollier, 2007). Ambivalent sexism reinforces and therefore justifies inequalities by prescribing traditional roles to both men and women, it’s ability to operate relies on the restriction of women’s roles, therefore making women regulate their behaviours. (Glick and Fiske, 2001). A role often forced upon women is childbearing. This is demonstrated by the motherhood mandate (Russo, 1976), which equates motherhood with womanhood and has traditionally defined women’s roles, identities, and social values through their motherhood (Ireland, 1993), this therefore adds to social and moral pressures to women not to remain voluntarily childless (May, 1995). Several predictors of negative attitudes toward childlessness have been established in studies conducted in the United States using national surveys of families and households (Koropeckyj-Cox and Pendell 2007); the focus of the present study however is ambivalent sexism within British University students. To date, there is only one study that has tested the link between ambivalent sexism and attitudes towards childlessness (Husnu, 2016), however this study focused on Muslim undergraduates in Turkey, therefore the current study aims to build on this in the context of the United Kingdom.