How Race Influences and Amplifies Backlash Against Outspoken Women (Stanford Business)
Photo courtesy of Erin Schaff/Reuters.
When women break gender norms, the most negative reactions may come from people of the same race.
By Nadra Nittle, Stanford Business Insights, March 25, 2022
When Christine Blasey Ford testified in 2018 that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were high school students, she elicited empathy and outrage. The reactions were strikingly similar to those that accompanied the testimony of Anita Hill nearly 30 years earlier, when she accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. In both cases, the women faced backlash in part because they were insisting on being heard — an exercise of agency often associated with masculinity. But did race also play a role in how they were perceived?
The answer is yes, according to a new paper coauthored by Brian Lowery, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, found that “gender backlash” — negative reactions toward a woman who is perceived to be breaking gender norms — was more pronounced among people whose race was the same as the woman they were observing. White people’s sexism caused them to view Blasey Ford more harshly, but Black people’s sexism did not change the way they saw Blasey Ford; Black people’s sexism caused them to view Hill more unfavorably, but White people’s sexism didn’t affect their view of Hill nearly as much.
Lowery cowrote the paper with Vivian Xiao, a PhD candidate in organizational behavior at Stanford GSB, and Amelia Stillwell, an assistant professor of management at the University of Utah. Across five separate studies, the team found a consistent effect: People are more likely to expect women who share their racial identity to conform to gender norms — to “act like women” — and are more critical of those who do not than they are of women outside of their racial category.
“People who are in your racial in-group see you as gendered, and in some sense, you can say there’s something positive about that,” Lowery says. “Most people care whether people see them as men or women, and people in your racial in-group do that. And because of that, they expect you to behave the way they expect women to behave, and when you don’t, they sanction or punish you.”