Comments on the hostile sexism results in Barnes et al. 2018 "Sex and corruption: How sexism shapes voters' responses to scandal"

This post discusses whether the lowest levels of hostile sexism are properly understood as indicating the lowest measured levels of sexism.

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Barnes et al. 2018 "Sex and Corruption: How Sexism Shapes Voters' Responses to Scandal" in Politics, Groups, and Identities (ungated) reported results from an experiment that had an outcome variable with four levels, from "very unlikely" to "very likely", in which participants could indicate how likely the participant would be to vote for a hypothetical representative in the next election. Treatments were the representative's sex (man or woman) and the type of scandal that the representative had been involved in (corruption or sex).

Hostile sexism (Glick and Fiske 1996) was measured with three items:

1. Women are too easily offended
2. Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them
3. Women exaggerate their problems

Below is the hostile sexism panel for the sex scandal condition, from Barnes et al. 2018 Figure 2. The right side of the panel suggests that participants at the highest levels of hostile sexism were biased against women. But the left side of the panel suggests that participants at lowest levels of hostile sexism were biased against men.That low levels of hostile sexism do not indicate the absence of sexism seems plausible given that, in the article, the lowest level of hostile sexism for participants responding to all hostile sexism items required participants to disagree as much as possible on a 7-point scale with mildly negative statements about women, such as the statement that "Most women fail to appreciate all that men do for them". Strong disagreement with this statement is equivalent to expressing the view that most women appreciate all that men do for them, and it seems at least possible that persons with such a positive view of women might be unfairly biased in favor of women. Another way to think of it is that persons unfairly biased in favor of women must fall somewhere on the hostile sexism measure, and it seems plausible that these persons would place themselves at or toward the lower end of the measure.

"Sex and Corruption" co-author Emily Bacchus sent me data and code for the article, and these data indicate that the patterns for the dichotomous "very unlikely" outcome variable in the above plot hold when the outcome variable is coded with all four measured levels of vote likelihood, as in the plot below, in which light blue dots are for the male candidate and pink dots are for the female candidate:

Further analysis suggested that, in the sex scandal plot, much or all of the modeled discrimination against men at the lower levels of hostile sexism is due to the linear model and a relatively large discrimination against women at higher levels of hostile sexism. For example, for levels of hostile sexism from 0.75 through 1, there is a 0.75 discrimination against women (Ns of 20 and 32, p<0.01); for levels of hostile sexism from 0 through 0.25, there is a 0.20 discrimination against men (Ns of 95 and 94, p=0.07); for levels of hostile sexism at 0, there is a 0.09 discrimination against men (Ns of 35 and 28, p=0.70). Only 4 participants scored a 1 for hostile sexism. For levels of hostile sexism from 0.25 through 0.75, there is a 0.05 discrimination against men (Ns of 169 and 155, p=0.57).

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Recent political science that I am familiar with that has used a hostile sexism measure has I think at least implied that lower levels of hostile sexism are normatively good. For example, the Barnes et al. 2018 article discussed "individuals who hold sexist attitudes" (p. 14, implying that some participants did not hold sexist attitudes), and a plot in Luks and Schaffner 2019 labeled the low end of a hostile sexism measure as "least sexist". However, it is possible that persons at the lower levels of hostile sexism are nontrivially persons who are sexist against men. I don't think that this possibility can be conclusively accepted or rejected based on the Barnes et al. 2018 data, but I do think that it matters whether the proper labeling of the low end of hostile sexism is "least sexist" or is "most sexist against men", to the extent that such unambiguous labels can be properly used for the lower end of the hostile sexism measure.

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NOTES

Thanks to Emily Bacchus and her co-authors for comments and sharing data and code, and thanks for Peter Glick and Susan Fiske for comments.