Evidence that feminist self-identification is a better predictor of anti-male attitudes for men than for women
Based on a sample of undergraduate students at a university in Texas, Anderson et al. 2009 reported (p. 216) that:
Contrary to popular beliefs, feminists reported lower levels of hostility toward men than did nonfeminists.
But this stereotype-inconsistent pattern was based a coding of "feminist" that reflected whether a participant had defined "feminist" "in a way consistent with our operational definition of feminism" (p. 220) and not based on whether the participant self-identified as a feminist, a self-identification for which the researchers had data.
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I assessed claims about self-identified feminists' views of men using data from the ANES 2016 Time Series Survey national sample. My first predictor was a dichotomous measure of sex, coded 1 for female and 0 for male. My second predictor was self-identified feminist, coded as 1 for a participant who identified as a feminist or strong feminist in variable V161345.
The best available dataset measures to construct a measure of negative attitudes toward men were measures of perceived levels of discrimination against men and women in the United States (V162363 and V162362, respectively). I coded participants as 1 in a dichotomous variable if the participant indicated "none at all" for the amount of discrimination against men in the United States but indicated a nonzero level of discrimination against women in the United States. Denial of discrimination is a plausible measure of negative attitudes toward a group that faces discrimination, and there is statistical evidence that men in the United States face discrimination in areas such as criminal sentencing (e.g., Doerner 2012 and Starr 2015); moreover, men are formally excluded from certain opportunities, such as opportunities at the NSF-funded Visions in Methodology conference.
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In weighted regressions, 37% of nonfeminist women reported no discrimination against men and a nonzero level of discrimination against women, compared to 46% of feminist women, with a p-value of p=0.002 for the 9 percentage-point difference. However, the gap between feminist men and nonfeminist men was 20 percentage points, with 28% of nonfeminist men reporting no discrimination against men and a nonzero level of discrimination against women, compared to 48% of feminist men, with a p-value less than 0.001 for the difference. Feminist identification was thus associated with an 11 percentage-point larger difference in anti-male attitudes for men than for women, with a p-value for the difference of p=0.012.
Output for the interaction model is below:
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NOTES
1. My Stata code is here. ANES 2016 Time Series Study data is available here.
2. The denialDM output variable is dichotomous, but estimates and inferences do not change if logit is used instead of linear regression.
3. The dataset has another question (V161346) that asked participants how well "feminist" described them, on a 5-point scale (extremely well, very well, somewhat well, not very well, and not at all); inferences are the same using that measure. Inferences are also the same using V161345 to make a 3-part feminist measure coded from non-feminist to strong feminist. See the Stata code.
4. Hat tip to Nathaniel Bechhofer, who retweeted this tweet, which led to this post.
>The best available dataset measures to construct a measure of negative attitudes toward men were measures of perceived levels of discrimination against men and women in the United States (V162363 and V162362, respectively)
"Best available" doesn't mean good. I would assume there is a positive correlation here between perceived levels of discrimination and outright hostility, but without knowledge of what that correlation is none of the effect sizes listed are meaningful. The paper you're criticizing used an actual direct measurement of hostility, which is much more reliable.
Hi Jacob,
I agree that the article that I critiqued had a better measure of hostility toward men and that the estimates in my analysis should not be interpreted as if the outcome measure were hostility. However, I wouldn't agree that none of the effect sizes are meaningful per se, because I think that the estimates are meaningful interpreted based on the outcome variable of denial of discrimination, which I think is a reasonably good measure of negative attitudes toward any group that faces discrimination, in the sense that the measure can be reasonably expected to do a good job correctly sorting persons based on their attitudes toward the group in question.
But, considering your comment, I think that the post would have been stronger if framed as a response to the tweet that I was initially responding to, which stated in part that "Feminist women have more positive attitudes towards men than non-feminist women." Hopefully, you'd agree that my analysis is useful at least for assessing that tweet's directional claim.