Stereotypes about Muslims in the Netherlands: An Intersectional Approach

Abstract

We relied on a content analysis of freely generated stereotypes about Muslims and Muslim-majority immigrant groups from a representative sample of Dutch natives. Building on intersectionality theory and stereotype prototypicality, we hypothesized and found that ethnic-group stereotypes more accurately reflect stereotypes of ethnic-minority men compared with ethnic-minority women and that stereotypes of ethnic-minority women contain more unique elements that do not overlap with either stereotypes about the gender group or stereotypes about the general ethnic group. We also examined the overlap between stereotypes about Muslims and those associated with Turks, Moroccans, Somalis, and Syrians in the Netherlands. The overlap in stereotype content was largest with Turks and Moroccans, the two largest and most long-established Muslim immigrant groups in the Netherlands. Overall, our results demonstrate the importance of an intersectional approach to stereotypes based on gender and ethnicity and of distinguishing between different ethnic groups in research about Muslims.