Benevolent racism? The impact of target race on ambivalent sexism

Ambivalent Sexism Theory

Ambivalent sexism theory (Glick & Fiske, 1996) distinguishes sexism on two complementary and mutually reinforcing dimensions: hostile and benevolent. Hostile sexism (HS) characterizes women as easily offended, unappreciative of and seeking to gain power over men, and manipulative with their sexuality. Benevolent sexism (BS) places women on a pedestal and affirms their inherent purity, morality, and defenselessness. These attitudes arise from a desire to protect the beloved and weak (protective paternalism), a need for complementary gender differentiation, and a drive for heterosexual intimacy. Women who reject traditional gender roles by being feminists or career-oriented are the targets of hostile sexism, while those who adhere to the domestic norms for their gender by being homemakers and mothers are the recipients of benevolent sexism (Glick, Diebold, Bailey-Werner, & Zhu, 1997). Women are also subtyped on the basis of their sexual behavior (Sibley & Wilson, 2004): HS is expressed towards those who are promiscuous (the negative sexual subtype) and BS towards those who are chaste (the positive sexual subtype). The two ideologies thus act as a system of rewards and punishments that impede gender equality (Glick & Fiske, 2001).

Hostile and benevolent sexism are measured with Glick and Fiske’s (1996) 22-item Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). While men consistently endorse HS more strongly than women do, women tend to reject HS while still endorsing BS. High correlations between mean levels of HS and BS and replicated factor structures across 19 nations on six continents (Glick et al., 2000) indicate that ambivalent sexism is a coherent ideology at the societal level across cultural contexts.

Though subjectively positive in nature, benevolent sexism is a subtle and pernicious form of bias that shares the same ideological underpinnings as more blatantly hostile forms of sexism. A growing body of work suggests that it produces a variety of insidious effects. Women exposed to benevolent sexism in a controlled setting show decreased cognitive performance (Dardenne, Dumont, & Bollier, 2007), less motivation to engage in social activism that could benefit them (Becker & Wright, 2011), increased levels of body surveillance and shame (Shepherd et al., 2011), and greater system justification for the patriarchal status quo (Jost & Kay, 2005). BS can even affect women who strongly identify as feminists, such that they are more likely to report that they will initiate condom use after exposure to HS, but not to BS (Fitz & Zucker, 2014). Benevolent sexists react negatively towards women who violate norms of chastity, be it by willingly engaging in premarital sex (Sakalh-Uğurlu & Glick, 2003) or being raped by an acquaintance (Abrams, Viki, Masser, & Bohner, 2003), and norms of motherhood, by seeking an abortion (Obsorne & Davies, 2012) or defying the stereotype of nurturing behavior towards children (Viki, Massey, & Masser, 2005).

While ambivalent sexism has been studied for nearly 20 years now, the literature lacks a systematic investigation into how hostile or benevolent attitudes may be shaped by the target woman’s race. While research has shown that individuals with sexist attitudes also tend to have racist attitudes (Glick & Fiske, 1996; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), an examination of the impact of race on ambivalent sexism, particularly benevolent sexism, is essential to understand the subtle ways that sexism and racism interact.

Race as a Subtype of Benevolent Sexism

In the absence of information about a particular woman’s adherence to traditional gender roles, her race may function as a subtype that directs evaluators’ expression of ambivalent sexism. That is, the stereotypes and perceptions associated with a racial group may lead to the differential application of hostile and benevolent sexism by perceivers. Though ambivalent sexism theory makes no direct assumptions about race, we argue that White women may be the primary recipients of benevolent sexism.

One key component of BS, protective paternalism, may be expressed more toward White women than to Black women. The notion that women are defenseless and require male relatives and social institutions to safeguard their chastity and well-being (Young, 2003) has often been used to justify the mistreatment of racially stigmatized groups. In the United States, the need to protect White women from “hypersexual” and “ruthless” minority men has been used to justify violence against the Black community (Davis, 1983), both in the post-Reconstruction South (Hodes, 1993) and in modern organized racist movements (Blee, 2002). In the criminal justice system, the paternalism hypothesis has been offered to explain why female offenders are given more lenient sentences than male offenders (Visher, 1983); however, this leniency is not extended to minority women (Chesney-Lind & Pasko, 2012; Young, 1986). This protective bias may also help to explain why White women who experience domestic violence are seen as less culpable (Esqueda & Harrison, 2005) and are more likely to experience police intervention when victimized (Ferraro, 1989) compared to Black women. Protective paternalism, it appears then, has a history of being more closely tied to White women rather than Black women.

Black women and White women are also perceived and stereotyped differently, such that White women are stereotyped in ways consistent with BS, while Black female stereotypes stand in opposition to BS. Although both are stereotyped as childlike and emotional (Ehrenreich & English, 1978), White women have historically been characterized as angelic (Morton, 1991) while Black women are more often seen as antagonistic, unmannerly, loud (Niemann, Jennings, Rozelle, Baxter, & Sullivan, 1994), aggressive, stubborn, bitchy (Weitz & Gordon, 1993) and hypersexual (Davis & Cross, 1979). The archetypal promiscuous Black woman, the Jezebel, can be traced back to the antebellum South and depicts a seductive temptress who uses her sexuality to exploit men’s weaknesses (Jewell, 1993). This characterization of Black women as innately licentious was used as justification for their sexual exploitation at the hands of White slave owners (Pilgrim, 2002). This and other negative stereotypes remain pervasive in modern depictions of Black women in television, films, music videos, and social media (Thompson, 2013). While there do exist more seemingly positive stereotypes such as the “strong Black woman,” they remain at odds with the benevolent ideals of submissiveness and inherent fragility (Wyatt, 2008). Black women’s sexuality has never been depicted as moral or demure (Davis, 1983), in stark contrast to White women’s. Indeed, the ideal virgin in the public consciousness and mass media is young and White—she is never a woman of color (Valenti, 2009).

In addition to the negative stereotypes, it has been suggested that Black women are often seen as less “appropriately feminine” (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008), whereas femininity is a central component of BS. In an examination of how race and gender affect person perception, Black men and women were both judged as more masculine than their White counterparts, and the conflation of “Blackness” with “maleness” resulted in Black women being rated as less physically attractive (Goff, Thomas, & Jackson, 2008). Participants also mistakenly categorized Black women as men more frequently than they mis-categorized other groups by gender. These findings reflect a larger societal context in which femininity is associated with Whiteness and masculinity is associated with Blackness (Hull et al., 1982). Due to this association of femininity with White women, we argue that BS should be more closely associated with White females than Black females.

We designed the present studies to integrate race into ambivalent sexism theory, with a focus on the differential application of BS based on female race. Study 1 tested whether a woman’s race could act as a subtype to impact hostile and benevolent evaluations of her. Study 2 examined how sexually subtyped behaviors interact with race to influence hostile and benevolent evaluations of women.

Study 1

Divergent racial stereotypes regarding behavior suggest that ambivalent sexism is differentially directed at Black women and White women. Our primary hypothesis posits that benevolent sexism should be directed more at White women, since they are stereotyped to match benevolent sexism ideals of purity and defenselessness (Hypothesis 1a). Though hostile sexism is not our primary outcome of interest, hostile sexism may be directed more at Black women, whose stereotypes of aggression and sexual availability contradict these ideals (Hypothesis 1b). Given the more negative stereotypes of Black women, we expected that they would also be rated less positively overall than White women (Hypothesis 1c).

To test these hypotheses, we presented participants with images of Black or White women and had them report their hostile and benevolent attitudes about her. Participants also rated the woman on several positive personality traits, which allowed for the differentiation between subjectively positive benevolent sexism and more positive evaluations overall. In order to better understand the process by which race impacts expressions of HS and BS, we examined participants’ own endorsement of HS and BS, as well as their racial attitudes, as possible moderators.

Methods

Results

The responses of participants who failed the manipulation check (N = 5) were excluded from further analyses.

A MANCOVA ¹ [between-subjects factor: race (Black, White); covariate: feminine, attractive ratings; outcome: HS, BS, positive evaluations] revealed a significant main effect of the race condition, Wilks’ Λ = .90, F(3, 121) = 4.30, p =.006, partial η² = .10. There was no main effect of femininity, Wilks’ Λ = 1.00, F(3, 121) = 1.45, p =.23, partial η² = .04, or attractiveness, Wilks’ Λ = .96, F(3, 121) = 1.83, p =.15, partial η² = .04, ratings of the photos.

Consistent with Hypothesis 1a, more benevolent sexism was expressed to the White faces, (M = 3.65, SD = 0.67) than the Black faces, (M = 3.42, SD = 0.68), F(1, 123) = 4.61, p = .03, partial η² = .04. However, there was no significant difference between the hostile sexism directed at the White (M = 3.18, SD = 0.81) and Black (M = 3.01, SD = 0.98) faces, F(1, 123) = 0.48, p = .49, partial η² = .004, suggesting Hypothesis 1b is not supported. White faces were also assigned more positive trait evaluations (M = 3.72, SD = 0.56) than Black faces (M = 3.50, SD = 0.57), F(1, 123) = 11.33, p =.001, partial η² = .08, indicating support for Hypothesis 1c (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Ratings of benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, and positive trait evaluations for Black and White females.

Discussion

Consistent with our hypotheses, when only racial category information was present, more benevolent sexism was expressed toward White females than Black females. The implicit assumption is that the White female is more closely aligned with BS ideals of fragility, purity, and need for protection, while the Black female violates these ideals. This finding suggests that subtypes based on gender roles or sexual behaviors are not always necessary for the application of benevolent sexism toward individual women; in the absence of information about a woman’s behavior, being White may be enough to elicit increases in benevolent sexism on this measure. While there was a statistically significant difference between these two groups, the effect size was relatively small (Cohen, 1988) and we cannot yet predict how it would impact behavior toward real women.

White females were also assigned more positive traits than the Black females, suggesting that participants perceived the White females more positively overall. In this case, perceptions of BS and overall impressions were in line with each other, as “positive” evaluations of BS went along with more positive impressions of the female target overall. However, there was no difference between the amounts of hostile sexism directed at Black and White women. This is somewhat unexpected given the stereotypes of Black women as promiscuous and antagonistic, which violate traditional gender norms and should increase HS. Marginally more HS to the Black females was observed among participants with higher modern racism scores. It could be that HS, unlike BS, requires explicit subtyping, such that women need to be identified as career-oriented or promiscuous before HS is expressed.

Study 2

Study 1 demonstrated that females’ race alone could act as a subtype to elicit differential rates of benevolent sexism. However, it is unclear how race would impact the HS and BS evaluations of a woman whose adherence to or rejection of traditional gender roles is known. That is, how does race interact with the application of BS when the target’s behavior conforms or violates BS ideals? Following a procedure by Sibley and Wilson (2004), Study 2 tests how manipulating race influences the hostile and benevolent evaluations of women who are chaste (positive sexual subtype) or promiscuous (negative sexual subtype).

When asking participants to judge the behavior of stereotyped individuals, shifting standards (Biernat, 2003; Biernat, Manis, & Nelson, 1991) are likely to occur. According to the shifting standards model, judgments of members of stereotyped groups are made with reference to within-category standards. That is, stereotypes of a group will determine evaluations of individuals within that group. For instance, given the stereotype that men are more naturally skilled at math than women, one is likely to judge the performance of a particular woman in a computational physics class against the relatively lower standard for women and the performance of a man against the relatively higher standard for men. Because subjective judgments such as “tall,” “athletic,” or “intelligent” are not anchored to any consistent objective scale, these labels mean different things when they are directed at different targets. As a result, “good at math” does not mean the same thing for a woman as it does for a man: when directed at a male student, the phrase indicates an assessment of skill, but when directed at a female student, there is a subtextual, implicit comparison to other members of the stereotyped group, such that she is only “good at math for a woman.”

Another assumption of the shifting standards model is that evidentiary standards are lower for individuals who are members of groups that are stereotyped as lacking in some domain. When asked what level of performance was required to meet minimum standards for a job, women were held to lower minimum standards than men, and Black men were held to lower minimum standards than White men (Biernat & Kobrynowicz, 1997). When expectations for a group are low (i.e., when stereotypes of the group are negative), individuals who surpass them are rewarded with nonzero sum behaviors or outcomes (Biernat, 2003). These include actions that can be bestowed upon many individuals without resource depletion, such as nonverbal responses or expressions of praise. That is, they are unlimited in nature and thus can be applied toward many targets without restriction. For the woman in the physics class, an A on an exam would elicit more praise for her performance compared to a male peer with the same score. In addition, female softball players who perform well receive more cheers and verbal praise than male players (Biernat & Vescio, 2002), and female supervisors in the workplace are described as more supportive than male supervisors (Gupta, Jenkins, & Beehr, 1983). However, these more positive evaluations do not lead to zero-sum rewards in which behavior toward one individual restricts options available to another, such as choice decisions or finite resources. Though highly praised, women do not receive better batting positions (Biernat & Vescio, 2002) or promotions (Gupta et al., 1983). Furthermore, those wishing to refute accusations of discrimination in hiring or promotions (or any zero-sum outcome) can submit the increased praise (non-zero-sum outcome) for women as evidence of their impartiality.

In both these cases, the praise (non-zero-sum outcomes) for the women who succeed in the workplace or on the field, while subjectively positive, belies the lower expectations held about their competence. In the same way that benevolent sexism is subjectively positive yet predicated on notions of inferiority, the accolades bestowed upon women who exceed the lower standards set for them are the result of patronizing surprise rather than a sincere judgment of quality.

The expression of benevolent sexism could be characterized as a non-zero-sum behavior, because these judgments can be directed at any number of recipients without resource depletion. As such, it fits into a shifting standards framework. Given the aforementioned evidence that the expectations of Black women’s sexual behavior are more negative than those of White women, Black women exhibiting more positively subtyped sexual behavior (by being chaste) should be judged against the relatively lower standard for Black women and be “rewarded” with benevolent sexism. Ambivalence amplification (Hass, Katz, Rizzo, Bailey, & Eisenstadt, 1991), which states that individuals with ambivalent attitudes about an out-group will rate out-group members who succeed at a task more favorably than in-group members, could also predict this outcome. Conversely, because the purity expectations for White women are so entrenched, a White woman who violates the chastity norms for her gender and race by being promiscuous may receive more scorn, in the form of hostile sexism, than a promiscuous Black woman, who would be conforming to the negative stereotypes of sexual availability for her race.

Study 1 demonstrated that when given no other information about a woman besides her race, participants expressed significantly more benevolent sexism to the White woman than to the Black woman. Study 2 builds on Study 1 by manipulating both the target’s race and her sexual behavior in order to examine how race and sexual subtype impact HS and BS. In light of these theories, we predict that more benevolent sexism will be expressed towards a chaste Black woman than a chaste White woman (Hypothesis 2a), while more hostile sexism will be expressed towards a promiscuous White woman than a promiscuous Black woman (Hypothesis 2b). Regarding the measure of overall positivity, the pattern found in Study 1 may be replicated regardless of BS or sexual behavior (with more positive evaluations of White women than Black women), or, oppositely, chaste Black women may receive more positive evaluations in addition to more BS than chaste White women. As in Study 1, we tested whether any of these effects would be moderated by participants’ baseline HS, BS, and racial attitudes.

Methods

Results

Of the 238 surveys gathered, 50 failed to correctly identify the race of the female target and were excluded from the analyses. While the race manipulation in Study 1 used pictures of female faces, this study relied on racially indicative names in a vignette. We attribute the increase in manipulation check failures to the current study’s more subtle race manipulation and excluded these participants in order to ensure that the reported findings reflect those participants who were more likely thinking specifically about Black women or White women when they made their evaluations, as these ratings correspond to the tested hypotheses. If these 50 were included, the pattern remained the same for the main variables of interest.

A 2 (race: Black vs. White) x 2 (sexual subtype: positive vs. negative) x 2 (outcomes: BS, HS, positive traits) MANOVA revealed a significant interaction of subtype and race, Wilks’ Λ = .94, F(3, 182) = 3.65, p = .014, partial η² = .06. There was also a main effect of subtype condition, Wilks’ Λ = .91, F(3, 182) = 6.21, p < .0001, partial η² = .09, but no main effect of race condition, Wilks’ Λ = .99, F(3, 182) = 0.14, p = .94, partial η² = .002.

Benevolent Sexism

In order to test Hypothesis 2a, a 2 (race) x 2 (subtype) ANOVA on benevolent evaluations of the target found a significant interaction between race and sexual subtype, F(1, 184) = 7.133, p = .008, partial η² = .04. Breaking down the interaction, when examining the positive subtype, there was significantly more BS expressed to the chaste Black woman (M = 3.23, SD = 0.83) than the chaste White woman (M = 2.88, SD = 0.88), F(1, 96) = 4.11, p = .045, partial η² = .04, see Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

Benevolent evaluations of women as a function of their race and sexual behavior.

Hostile Sexism

A 2 (race) x 2 (subtype) factorial ANOVA on hostile evaluations of the target found an interaction between subtype and race that neared significance, F(1, 184) = 3.75, p = .054, partial η² = .02. When restricted to the negative subtype, there was no difference in the amount of HS directed at the promiscuous White woman (M = 2.61, SD = 0.79) and the promiscuous Black woman (M = 2.41, SD = 0.76), F(1, 88) = 1.39, p = .24, partial η² = 0.02, see Figure 3. Furthermore, there was no difference between the amounts of hostile sexism directed at the Black woman when she was chaste (M = 2.39, SD = 0.65) or promiscuous (M = 2.41, SD = 0.76), F(1, 91) = 0.03, p = .86, partial η² < .001. Instead, there was a significant main effect of subtype, such that there was more HS to promiscuous women than chaste women, F(1, 184) = 4.75, p = .03, partial η² = .03. This finding, while consistent with Sibley and Wilson’s (2004) results, does not support Hypothesis 2b, which predicted more hostile sexism directed at the promiscuous White target than the promiscuous Black target.

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Figure 3.

Hostile evaluations of women as a function of their race and sexual behavior.

Discussion

Study 2 extended Study 1 by testing how a woman’s race and sexually subtyped behavior impact expressions of BS, HS, and overall positivity towards her. Study 1 manipulated only the woman’s race and found a significant main effect, such that more BS was expressed to the White woman than the Black woman. In Study 2, we untangle this effect further by adding in sexually subtyped behaviors (promiscuous vs. chaste) to test for interactions. We found that once both race and sexual subtype were examined, the main effect of race disappeared and was replaced by a significant interaction effect.

Consistent with shifting standards theory, expressions of benevolent sexism were higher for the chaste Black woman than the chaste White woman. However, the chaste Black target was not evaluated any more positively on the trait measures than the chaste White target, suggesting that the Black woman may have been “praised” with benevolent sexism for her stereotype-inconsistent behavior, but this did not translate into more positive evaluations overall. In this case, perceptions of BS and positive impressions were incongruous, as “positive” expressions of BS favored the chaste Black woman while positive overall impressions favored chaste women over promiscuous women, regardless of their race.

While we had predicted that more HS would be directed at the promiscuous White target than the promiscuous Black target (Hypothesis 1b), we did not find that hostile sexism was differentially applied based on race. This finding is consistent with Study 1, which also did not find different levels of hostile sexism directed at Black faces and White faces. This suggests that the women were equally punished for violating the chastity ideals of their gender, irrespective of race. When White women violate their expected roles of purity, they are not punished any more than Black women are for this behavior. That is, they are “protected” from the overly negative evaluations that shifting standards would predict for violating their expected positive sexual behavior. These results are also contrary to ambivalence amplification (Hass et al., 1991), which would have predicted more extreme evaluations of the Black targets.

We assessed participants’ endorsement of HS, BS, and their modern racism as potential moderators of these effects. Unlike Study 1, participants’ modern racism did not alter how they evaluated the White and Black targets. Only baseline HS approached conventional levels of significance, such that participants with higher HS directed marginally less BS at the promiscuous Black target, but not promiscuous White target. As previously stated, HS punishes women who reject traditional gender roles (Glick & Fiske, 2001). That in this study higher endorsement of HS led to marginally less BS for the Black woman who violated traditional norms but not her White counterpart further demonstrates how even White women who reject the purity norms of their gender may be “protected” by their Whiteness from “losing” benevolent sexism.

General Discussion

These two studies sought to integrate race into ambivalent sexism theory by measuring how benevolent and hostile sexism are differentially applied to Black women and White women, thus merging this modern form of sexism with the comparatively larger racism literature to test for vital intergroup differences. Previous research had identified adherence to traditional gender roles as a predictor of BS (Glick et al., 1997; Sibley & Wilson, 2004). We found that more BS was directed at White faces than Black faces (Study 1), suggesting that race could function as a subtype in the absence of traditional behavioral cues. However, when Black and White women were sexually subtyped, more BS was expressed to the chaste Black woman than the chaste White woman (Study 2). Target race is therefore not the only determinant of benevolent sexism; race and behavior can interact to produce different outcomes.

Given that the BS ideals of purity and defenselessness are incompatible with stereotypes of Black women as promiscuous (Jewell, 1993) and aggressive (Weitz & Gordon, 1993), we maintain that this finding is indicative of shifting standards, whereby individuals who exceed the lower expectations of their stereotyped group receive more praise (non-zero-sum rewards) for their stereotype-inconsistent behavior. It is because expectations for Black women’s behavior were more negative that participants tended to report that the Black target should be “cherished and protected” and “set on a pedestal by her man” when she surpassed them by being chaste, even more so than her White counterpart. While subjectively positive, this reveals the impact of negative stereotypes and only reinforces her subordinate status relative to men.

Positive impressions of the women differed across studies, with a main effect of race in Study 1 (favoring White women) and a main effect of sexual subtype in Study 2 (favoring chaste behavior.) Even though she conformed to traditional gender norms, the chaste Black woman was not viewed more positively overall, indicating that participants only treated her differently on the one positively valenced sexist measure of benevolent sexism. That is, shifting standards occurred on the measure of BS but not on overall positive impressions. This result implies that the benefits for Black women who conform to traditional gender norms may not extend beyond increased BS.

Across both studies, hostile sexism was not differentially applied based on race. Here the findings both lend support to Sibley and Wilson’s (2004) conclusions about ambivalent sexism and sexual subtype and qualify them by race: While more HS was directed at promiscuous women than chaste women, there was no difference in the amounts of HS directed at Black women when they were promiscuous or chaste. That we were able to demonstrate that a previously uncontested assumption might not necessarily apply to women of every race hints at the magnitude of other studies within this literature that could benefit from a more intersectional paradigm. We suspect that these comparable levels of HS to Black women, regardless of sexual subtype, reflect the influence of other negative stereotypes, which characterize Black women as loud, antagonistic, unmannerly (Niemann et al., 1994) and less “appropriately feminine” (Goff, Eberhardt, et al., 2008). Alternatively, it could be that shifting standards occur more exclusively with expressions of praise than contempt. Either way, Black women may continue to experience hostility regardless of their adherence to traditional norms of chastity.

Although we observed differences in benevolent sexism in these studies, care must be taken when interpreting the findings. While statistically significant, the observed mean differences are close to each other and to the scale midpoint. While the effect sizes across both studies were small, it is noteworthy that this effect emerged following a manipulation as subtle as changing the female target’s race. Prentice and Miller (1992) have argued that effects can still be important even when they are statistically small when researchers demonstrate how even a minimal manipulation of the independent variable can account for some variance of the dependent variable. In Study 2, changing the chaste woman’s name from Kate to Tanisha was enough to create a significant increase in BS. This finding has consequences for women in the real world insofar as it could produce differential treatment, perhaps in the form of racial and gender-based microaggressions, which are commonplace verbal or behavioral slights that communicate negative perceptions of a person or their group (Sue, 2010). For instance, Black teenagers dressing modestly or delaying sexual intercourse might receive increased praise for these actions in ways that communicate to them that they do so in spite of their racial identity. These microaggressions build on each other over time to produce negative psychological consequences, such as higher stress, feelings of powerlessness, and loss of integrity (Sue, Capodilupo, & Holder, 2008).

Future studies will want to examine how ambivalent sexism is differentially applied to Hispanic and Asian Americans, as well as other ethnic groups in other settings. As the stereotype of Black women as sexually available has its roots in slavery in the American antebellum South (Jewell, 1993), it is possible that our findings would not generalize to countries that do not share this history. Instead, results may be contingent upon the ethnic groups that exist in a particular country and the stereotypes about those groups that are specific to that time and location. As Black males are also stereotyped as hypersexual (Hall, 1995), there may be differences between perceptions of promiscuous White men and Black men as well. Further explorations of how ambivalent sexism is applied to women of different races may want to make use of indirect measures of implicit attitudes, especially given the social sensitivity of this topic (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009).

Though the present study was unable to demonstrate shifting standards of hostile sexism toward promiscuous White women, this effect may emerge in a more applied setting. In the criminal justice domain, White women who violate expectations of their racial group by being prostitutes may receive more severe punishments upon arrest than Black prostitutes. Evidence suggests that prostitutes are seen as violating cultural values (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989), but the strength of this perception and subsequent treatment of this woman might differ depending on her race. This could come in the form of a judge recommending harsher bonds or a police officer using more force or callous language. These and other experiments would help to clarify if and how reactions to women who violate traditional gender roles by being promiscuous are influenced by her race.

The paradigm used here brings a much-needed intersectional perspective to the ambivalent sexism literature. It calls into question the generalizability of studies with the ASI that have failed to broach the subject of race. To the extent that this proves a fruitful line of inquiry, others may be encouraged to examine more constructs related to gender through the lens of race, and theories of racism in the context of gender. A more thorough and representative understanding of concurrent gender and racial prejudice will eliminate the overwhelming bias in the field that the primary targets of sexism are White women and the primary targets of racism are Black men, resulting in a discipline better able to address discrimination in all its contemporary forms.