Sexism Toward Women and Men Overlaps Substantially in their Underlying Motivations and Cognitive Distortions: Characterizing the psychology of sexism and prejudice and challenging the narrative
Sexism Toward Women and Men Overlaps Substantially in their Underlying Motivations and Cognitive Distortions: Characterizing the psychology of sexism and prejudice and challenging the narrative
While sexism toward women is frequently discussed as a social problem, little attention is paid to sexism toward men, and sexism toward men has not been well characterized or researched. It is a popular belief that sexism is only perpetuated by men due to having more social power, and that sexism from women is justified and causally different from sexism from men. In this paper, I report results of an investigation into the nature and cause of sexism when perpetrated by either sex. It is demonstrated that sexism regardless of which sex it is directed to is the same thing caused by a shared set of traits and biases, which overlap with other prejudices that have very similar correlates (Cloudfindings 2024b).
Using the dataset from Cloudfindings (2024a), I created four more variables, two being the female-bias and male-bias scales but adjusted for gender diagnosticity, and a composite sexism variable.
All study variables used in Cloudfindings (2024a) were entered in correlation analysis with the three sexism scales. Variables of interest were firstly included based on calculated r scores using the mean of the misandry and misogyny correlation for the variable, than multiplied by (-1 their difference), and statistical significance of those scores (or if the score for the sexism composite was significant).
Table 1
Table 2
Based on these tables, variables were chosen based on high correlation with total sexism and similar correlations for misogyny and misandry [Table 1], and another set based on large differences for correlations with misogyny and misandry and their combined total correlations [Table 2].
The first and second set of variables were factor analyzed separately. The first had three dimensions [Table 3], and the second had two [Table 4].
Table 3
Table 4
With these factors, another factor analysis was performed, with the sexism variables and gender diagnosticity to test the efficacy for the created factors to characterize sexism and how it differs between men. Principal components analysis supported this hypothesis strongly, with the first factors and all sexism variables loading highly in the same direction of the first component, and the second component loading diametrically on misogyny and misandry, with the differentiation factors loading highly, though some other factors loaded too, and gender diagnosticity loaded very highly on this factor, validating it as a male-female dimension of attitudes and motivations for those attitudes [Table 5].
Table 5
To determine the most important facets of overall sexism and sex specific sexism, multiple regression was used [Table 6].
Table 6
PC1 in Table 5 was then analyzed through multiple regression to determine the most component traits contributing to the sexism factor [Table 6]
Table 6
I also correlated the sexism factor with the original set of variables to verify the underlying characteristics of misogyny and misandry. [Table 7] Only statistically significant predictors were included.
Table 7
The original sexism variable, nor the later extracted factor were associated with intelligence, however intelligence had a very strong (-0.65) negative association with self centered moralism, reflecting previous findings (Cloudfindings 2024a). Authoritarian collectivism also had a weak negative association with intelligence (-0.31).
Ultimately, sexism regardless of whether the target is a man or woman, is underpinned by three main features: an authoritarian, conformist, group centric orientation, a self centered moralized perspective on things that rejects logic and understanding others, and a selective ability to empathize with others or difficulty empathizing with others. Features which differ between misogynists and misandrists is that misogynists are motivated by authoritarian dominance more so than misandrists, misandrists are motivated by a self serving moralized worldview moreso than men, and progressive attitudes as well as authoritarian collectivist views are held far more than female misandrists than misogynists.
Of the factors that characterized sexism, respectively they reflect the traits social dominance orientation, low intelligence, and low cognitive empathy. The non-traditionalism factor appeared to be the inverse of the group centered authoritarianism factor, and also negatively correlated with other sexism factors - it is possible that this represents an artifact of it reflecting female-typical worldviews (Cloudfindings 2024a,b) and therefore predicts misandry relative to misogyny - the correlation with this factor and group centered authoritarianism was also (r=-0.93), suggesting indeed that this factor is an artifact and should be just considered the inverse. The last factor resembles the low intelligence factor, however involves additional traits of OcPD (r=0.32), OCD (r=0.46), and correlates strongly with female typical moral foundations (harm and fairness, r=0.57 - 0.68), in addition it does not correlate with neuroticism like the low intelligence factor but does with extraversion and agreeableness, and is the only one to correlate with affective empathy (r=0.42), therefore this may represent an excessively disgust sensitive and compulsive phenotype based thinking style.
Cloudfindings (2024a) Permissive Attitudes Toward Use of Slurs are Predicted by Racism & Low Empathy as well as Non-Conformity & Intelligence
Cloudfindings (2024b) The True Political Compass: A Hypothesis of the Underlying Psychology of Political Orientations
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