Gender Backlash and the Moderating Role of Shared Racial Group Membership.

Research suggests that White women often experience more gender backlash than women of color in response to expressions of agency. We consider whether this differential in backlash is driven by the match or mismatch of the race of both perceivers and targets. Much of the existing work in this space examines the perspective of White perceivers, which might underestimate racial minority women's susceptibility to backlash if backlash occurs primarily in same-race interactions. We examine how the racial group memberships of targets and perceivers jointly affect backlash against gender-norm violating women. In analyses of Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford's accusations of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh and Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas during their respective U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings, an archival analysis of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and two experiments, we find that perceivers of different races tend to express more backlash toward racial in-group than out-group women.

Gendered racial boundary maintenance: Social penalties for White women in interracial relationships.

Throughout American history, formal laws and social norms have discouraged interracial romantic relationships. Interracial relationships blur the boundaries between racial groups, challenging the essentialized racial categories that define Whiteness as an exclusive, high status identity. Whites, who are the most resistant to interracial marriage of any racial group, have used their dominant position in American society to enforce norms against interracial relationships. Despite the importance of racial homogamy to White identity and status, we argue that gender roles make violating norms against intimate intergroup contact more costly for women than men, leading to Whites' greater resistance to interracial relationships involving White women. In a representative American sample using a natural quasi-experiment, as well as 3 follow-up lab experiments, we find that White women face differential social penalties for intimate intergroup contact-being perceived as gender deviant and low status within the group. By contrast, having a racial out-group partner did not influence status perceptions of men or Black women. Status perceptions of both individuals in the couple predicted attitudes toward the couple as a unit, leading to greater prejudice toward interracial relationships involving White women than White men. This research demonstrates the existence of a gendered double standard for intimate intergroup contact among Whites, revealing that gender norms play a critical role in the maintenance of American racial boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Ambivalent stereotypes link to peace, conflict, and inequality across 38 nations.

A cross-national study, 49 samples in 38 nations (n = 4,344), investigates whether national peace and conflict reflect ambivalent warmth and competence stereotypes: High-conflict societies (Pakistan) may need clearcut, unambivalent group images distinguishing friends from foes. Highly peaceful countries (Denmark) also may need less ambivalence because most groups occupy the shared national identity, with only a few outcasts. Finally, nations with intermediate conflict (United States) may need ambivalence to justify more complex intergroup-system stability. Using the Global Peace Index to measure conflict, a curvilinear (quadratic) relationship between ambivalence and conflict highlights how both extremely peaceful and extremely conflictual countries display lower stereotype ambivalence, whereas countries intermediate on peace-conflict present higher ambivalence. These data also replicated a linear inequality-ambivalence relationship.