2012-02-01 @ admin
The purposes of my research were to examine whether men’s and women’s responses to gender discrimination differ depending upon whether the source of the discrimination was a person versus a policy or rule and to address one reason why individuals’ responses may differ depending on the discrimination source.
The results of the last year’s research suggest that the source of the discrimination is an important determinant of whether or not both women and men make an attribution to gender discrimination. Furthermore, results showed that one reason individuals may be less likely to indicate that another person is sexist pertains to the costs to the perpetrator for making such attributions. Specifically, consistent with Hypotheses 1 and 2, “Experiments 1 and 2” demonstrated that individuals were more likely to make attributions to an unfair rule than a sexist experimenter, and more likely to make discrimination attributions when a rule rather than a person was the source of the discrimination. In addition, in Experiment 1 (in support of Hypothesis 3), women were more reluctant to indicate that a person was to blame for the discrimination that they experienced, even though a person was the source of their discrimination. In support of Hypothesis 4, “Experiment 2” demonstrated that participants were less likely to make attributions to gender discrimination (i.e., sexist experimenter and sexist rules) when there were costs to the perpetrator for making such attributions. Furthermore, this minimization was especially likely to occur when another person was the source of the gender discrimination.
This study has important theoretical and practical implications. The results of this research suggest another reason why individuals may fail to make attributions to gender discrimination. Specifically, individuals may be less likely to make attributions to a sexist person, even when the person is the source of the discrimination, because they want to protect the perpetrator from negative ramifications or perhaps they want to protect themselves from being blamed for any harm caused to the perpetrator. This research also indicates that discrimination source is an important factor to consider in why individuals sometimes make, and other times fail to make, attributions to gender discrimination. As there has been minimal research manipulating the source of discrimination and subsequent motivational effects, these studies add to a growing body of literature focusing on when and why individuals make attributions to gender discrimination.
This research also suggests that there are gender differences in attributions to gender discrimination, and that it is important to examine both women’s and men’s attributions to gender discrimination. In Experiment 1, women were less likely to blame another person for the gender discrimination they experienced than men. Furthermore, although the gender differences in “Experiment 2” were not significant such that both men and women minimized gender discrimination attributions when there were high costs to the perpetrator, the pattern of means suggests that women minimized gender discrimination to a greater extent than men. Thus, it appears that women are more reluctant than men to make gender discrimination attributions, especially when a person is the source of the discrimination and there are costs to that perpetrator for making such attributions.
Practically, this research suggests that a perpetrator could discriminate against an individual, especially a woman, and not be confronted or held accountable, but if a rule is involved in the discrimination, then individuals are more likely to stand up for themselves and report discrimination. Furthermore, it also could indicate to perpetrators that their actions are permissible. If their actions are deemed acceptable, then these perpetrators will continue to discriminate against their victims and others. Such actions may further the notion that sexism is acceptable if individuals, especially women, do not acknowledge or report it. Furthermore, it suggests that individuals who observe a discriminatory event may have to take on the responsibility of publicly reporting the discrimination because victims may be unwilling to do so themselves.
The present research compares people versus policies as the source of discrimination. It should be acknowledged that people make the policies. Thus, policies do not stem from a nonhuman source, but people create these policies. Nevertheless, often it is unclear who is the source of policies, and they are often created by groups of people. Therefore, most of the time, individuals do not have to point out a specific individual when stating a policy is discriminatory. This is always the case if an individual is the source of the discrimination. Although the fact that people create policies does not negate our findings, future research could further explore the complexity of these processes.
It should also be noted that it may take more effort (and perhaps additional people or a committee) to change a rule or policy than to change a person. Although identifying unfair practices gets the change into action and claiming discrimination promotes change, challenging a rule is conceptually different from changing a person. Along the same lines, it is not clear what the punishment would be to an unfair psychology department versus a person or whether one type of punishment would be more severe than the other. The present studies did not assess what individuals thought the punishment would or should be or how difficult it would be to change a person versus a policy. Future research should address such issues. Nevertheless, this research shows that individuals respond to discriminatory rules versus people differently and proposes one reason as to why differences exist. Future research may further examine differences in responding.
Our study was conducted at a northeastern United States university with a student sample. Specifically, the sample of participants used throughout the studies consisted of primarily White, North American college-aged students. The results of the research should be generalizable to the responses of undergraduates in the northeastern part of the United States. Race of participants was held constant across the three studies in the present research to ensure that the discrimination was gender-based and perceived as gender-based. It could be that there are ethnic or age differences in making attributions to discrimination that this research did not address. However, while the mean levels of making attributions to sexism could change by age or ethnicity, discrimination source is likely to be important across groups. In addition, because of the privileged background of these subjects, these participants may have previously experienced fewer instances of or less severe encounters with sexism. Future research could examine whether these effects generalize to other samples of men and women, such as other racial groups, ethnicities, and age groups.
There also may be cultural differences in such attributions to discrimination. The majority of research focusing on gender discrimination and being the target of gender discrimination has been conducted in North America. It is difficult to make comparisons across cultures because studies similar to the ones we conducted are virtually nonexistent, and there has been little research focusing on discrimination from the target’s perspective that has been conducted outside of the United States. However, future research could examine whether these effects generalize to other samples of men and women from other parts of the United States or other cultures. For example, future studies may compare our results to samples from Eastern cultures, such as the Chinese mainland, and Latin America, as there are distinctive cultural and economical differences that may lead to differences in gender discrimination attributions.
To conclude, discrimination seems to be a unique case. Persons with discrimination-related grievances are much less likely to complain about their problems than are persons with grievances arising from consumer purchases or other common kinds of personal problems. Perhaps, as individuals and society become more aware of the fact that individuals often are reluctant to make attributions to personal discrimination and continue to come to understand why individuals fail to make gender discrimination attributions, individuals will become more willing to confront gender discrimination and hold perpetrators accountable.
Acknowledgement We thank all of the undergraduate research assistants who spent many hours working on this project. In addition, we thank Kimberly Daubman and T. Joel Wade for providing insightful comments on an earlier version of the article.
Too difficult? Read “ Take a Stand for Discrimination “