Feminism is facing a backlash , with women's rights being rolled back in many countries and a significant number of people saying feminism has gone far enough or even too far. Yet women still face basic obstacles to education in some countries and are generally paid less than men . They still suffer from male violence and, in some places, face increasing restrictions to reproductive rights. There are even some places where families force midwives to kill their newborn girls .
Authors
- Magdalena Zawisza
Associate Professor in Gender and Consumer Psychology, Director of Groups and Societies Research Centre and Chair of Faculty Athena Swan Committee, Anglia Ruskin University
- Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka
Professor and Head of the Division of Cross-Cultural and Gender Psychology, University of Gdansk
Many women are also fed up with doing both a full-time job and the lion's share of domestic duties and unpaid caring jobs. It's easy to wonder whether gender equality is simply impossible, especially as many men inaccurately perceive that gains for women equate losses for men .
But there is hope. Our 62-nation psychological study, which is largest of its kind , suggests that gender equality benefits us all and sexism is harmful to everybody - women, men and nations in many surprising ways. As such, we all have an interest in promoting egalitarianism.
As our findings show, sexism is linked with several social ills affecting us all. For example, higher sexism predicted lower GDP - indicating lower economic productivity. It also predicted a lower "global peace index", meaning nation's higher domestic and international conflict, militarisation and lower safety and security.
Further, sexism was linked to a greater level of antidemocratic practices in a given country. Lastly, it even predicted shorter healthy lifespans (ones without chronic disease or disability) in women and men as measured with WHO's Healthy Life Expectancy in Women and Men. For example, our data reveals that one point increase in sexism (measured from 0-5) is linked with a 9.12 months shorter lifespan in men and 8.88 months in women.
While the type of analysis we did cannot directly prove that sexism causes these issues, the pattern of our findings aligns with theoretically driven predictions and with experiments that directly test such links on a smaller scale. It makes more sense to expect that sexism leads to poor health than that poor health leads to sexism, for example.
Specifically, other research reports that sexism reduces human capital by restricting women's education and job opportunities, thus depleting economic productivity. A country where most women work is likely to have much higher productivity than a country where all the women stay at home.
Research also shows that sexist masculine norms encourage male violence contributing to greater conflict. And we know that sexism is linked to medical discrimination for women , such as less medical research on women and treating women's complaints as less credible . This may lead to poorer health.
For men, sexism discourages seeking help for psychological or medical problems, seeing it as weakness. It also encourages risk-taking , such as aggression or not using seatbelts. This may well cause a reduction in health and wellbeing.
Two faces of sexism
Importantly, our study also reveals that affectionate but patronising attitudes to women are also harmful to all - you might not even recognise them as sexist . And you are not alone.
After 30 years of its conception, our research supports the ambivalent sexism theory . The theory proposes that sexism has two faces: hostile and benevolent. While both are ugly, the latter hides under the veil of superficial positivity. Hostile sexism is an open and overt hostility to non-traditional women and a desire to punish those who break norms, such as female politicians.
Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is superficially positive but patronising. It includes attitudes that reward traditional women, such as stay-at-home mums, by idealising them, offering them male protection and provision. This sounds innocent, but such beliefs imply women's weakness.
In fact, research has shown that exposure to benevolent sexism increases women's acceptance of hostile sexism, decreases their work performance , and reduces their support for gender equality action .
Both ideologies work together to maintain men's power over women: they form a system of rewards and punishments akin to the iron fist (hostility) in a velvet glove (benevolence) . Thus, hostile and benevolent sexism are internalised also by women.
Our study shows that people who hold benevolent sexist views are also more likely to hold hostile sexist views, as the two correlate positively in 62 countries across five continents. Compared with 2000, when the last such study was done in 19 countries , average national sexism scores dropped a meagre 0.47 points (on a 0-5 scale). See our world map of this and other concepts we measured .
While men are more sexist than women around the world, women's beliefs about themselves are also sexist to some extent. Interestingly, as men's hostile sexism increased, women embraced benevolent sexism more (sometimes outscoring men) - probably attempting to secure the promised protection and provision.
Unfortunately, this benevolent promise appears false. Across our 62 countries, the higher benevolent sexism, the lower was the gender equality, women's labour participation and the more time women spend on unpaid domestic chores.
Taken together, our research suggests that it may well be in the interests of women, men and nations alike to tackle sexism for a better future for us all. In other words, women's gains mean men's gains too.
Dr Magdalena Zawisza received funding for activities related to this study from from National Science Centre, Poland. She volunteers her expertise to Women on Boards CIC Leadership Committee and Think Tank, UK.
This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Centre in Poland (grant 18 number: 2017/26/M/HS6/00360) awarded to Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka
