“How Unconscious Sexism Could Help Explain Trump’s Win”
““I don’t think you can understand [Clinton’s] candidacy without understanding gender bias is baked into it,” Caroline Heldman, a political scientist at Occidental College who has written about internalized sexism, said in a telephone interview. “We don’t like women to be ambitious. It rubs men and women the wrong way.”
Measuring implicit bias is tricky — because the bias is unconscious, you can’t just ask people how they feel about women in a professional context, or about sexist attitudes. So researchers instead run online experiments that test how quickly subjects associate typically male or female words such as “boy” and “lady” with “career” or “family.” (You can take a version of the test at the website of Project Implicit, a nonprofit research organization.)
Project Implicit ran this experiment with more than 700,000 online test takers from 2006 to 2015. The results show that conservative women had higher implicit gender bias than women with other political ideologies and than men of any political ideology, according to data provided by Colin T. Smith, the project’s director of education, at my request. At every level of self-reported political ideology, women had a higher level of implicit gender bias than men…
HCD would like to do follow-up studies on the topic, including tracking bias levels over time and examining whether exposure to certain segments of the media affects bias.”
In a way, this totally doesn’t surprise me, that women have higher implicit bias under this test. We are constantly, constantly confronted with negative stereotypes and people and structures pushing against us and setting up boxes; men get a lot of it more indirectly.
I kinda suspect that I’m more implicitly racist (at least by the design of these tests) than most of my white friends, I just spend so much more time bring do much more impacted by race stereotypes.
The question I would be really interested in too is stereotype threat, and the fear that if we didn’t elect the perfect woman, the country wouldn’t ever give another woman a chance.
