Women's implicit prejudice and stereotyping toward female subgroups

Abstract

This study investigated how women show prejudice and stereotyping implicitly toward female subgroups. We examined the effects of primed and chronic self-representations on implicit prejudice and implicit stereotyping. We predicted that when self-representation as a traditional woman was more dominant compared to self-representation as a nontraditional woman, participants would regard housewives as more favorable than career women, and would regard the targets as stereotypic. Female participants, who had completed the Scale of Egalitarian Sex Role Attitude (SESRA), were asked to picture the future themselves as a career woman or a housewife. Then they engaged in two types of I AT to measure prejudiced responses and stereotypic responses toward female subgroups. We found that participants who were primed with their self-representations as a traditional woman enhanced implicit stereotypic responses toward female subgroups compared to those who were primed with self-representations as a nontraditional woman. We also found that traditionalists (i.e., those with low evaluations in SESRA) implicitly evaluated housewives more favorably than career women and than egalitarians (i.e., those with high evaluations in SESRA). These results suggested that prejudiced responses and stereotypic responses are independent.