Theresa Vescio, Penn State: Sugar-Coated Discrimination: How Subtle Sexism Undermines Women

The following are my notes from Vescio's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, February 28 2013.

Vescio’s research originally focused on how powerful men treat less powerful women [for example Vescio et al., 2004]. She studied patronizing behavior that derives from perceptions of women as warm but incompetent. She has documented the consequences of this patronizing behavior to women (in the lab) and how this patronization of women leads to performance detriments for women. 

Now: What happens when women perform as well as men?

The core components of masculinity are:

1. High power/high status (to lead rather than to follow)
2. Being “tough” emotionally, mentally, and physically
3. Not being feminine (this makes masculinity special and different from other social identities)

Masculinity is socialized in male groups (Pascoe, 2007; Kimmel, 2008). Masculinity is performed by men for men. [I’d say it's also performed for women and for the self.]

Masculinity is easily threatened (e.g., having men perform cross-gendered tasks, etc.).

Masculinity threats lead to aggression (social, physical, and sexual aggression) [see for example Berdahl, 2007; Maass et al. 2003; Vandello et al., 2009].

But is aggression necessarily the only response? For example, Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook CEO] introduced Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook COO] as “I encourage you all to have a crush on her.” Sandberg is beautiful, lovely skin, etc. Is this an example of sugar coated discrimination?

Vescio & Dahl (2012) experiment: Men were told they were going to work with a female partner on a masculine task. They took a “male gender knowledge test” and were given their and their female partner’s [supposed] scores. The man was told he did less well than the woman. This masculinity threat [doing less well than a woman on a male gender knowledge test] led to public discomfort for the man, which led to anger. Men were then given a “creative intelligence test,” which involved how to dress the female partner’s avatar. Men who were more threatened, uncomfortable, and angry chose more sexualized forms of dress for their female avatar. [Like sexual harassment research shows, sexualization is a way to cut a woman down.]

Sexualizing a woman triggers the male dominant role over women sexually – view women as objects, not as people (Gervais, Vescio & Allen, 2011). Self-objectification experiment: A male confederate directed objectifying glances at some women but not at others – the women who were sexually objectified performed worse on a math test.

Another Vescio & Dahl study: Experiment asked participants to put the right head on the body. Participants viewed images of men and women, some with exaggerated physical masculinity or femininity. Then they were given separate images in which the heads and body were mismatched and were asked to indicate whether a head went with the body based on the prior photos. There were more mismatches for women than for men.

In short, men were perceived more accurately as their wholes than as their parts, like people; women were more likely to be viewed by their parts than by their wholes, like objects. This type of fungibility and interchangeability of women is a fundamental part of the definition of stereotyping.

Conclusion: Discrimination is often sugar coated.