Gender & Work: challenging conventional wisdom

What motivates sex discrimination? Rounding up the usual suspects, negative stereotypes and hostility toward women would top the list. Challenging the conventional view, this paper focuses on subjectively favorable (but patronizing) attitudes toward women, labeled “benevolent sexism” (Glick & Fiske, 1996, 2001). Benevolent sexism harms women in multiple ways by: (a) justifying and reinforcing hostile sexism, (b) fostering often unrecognized discrimination that limits women’s opportunities and diminishes their performance, (c) eliciting backlash when resisted, and (d) sapping women’s personal ambitions and resistance to inequality