Join us on November 11 for the PhD Speaker Series featuring Dr. Ivona Hideg from the Lazaridis School of Business at Wilfrid Laurier University. Hideg's talk is titled: "The compassionate sexist? How benevolent sexism promotes and undermines support for gender employment equity policies."

About Dr. Ivona Hideg

Ivona Hideg is an Assistant Professor of OB/HRM in the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University. She holds a Ph.D. in OB/HRM Management from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and MSc in I/O Psychology from the University of Waterloo.

Ivona’s main areas of research include gender and cultural diversity and equality in the workplace and emotions and emotion regulation in the workplace. Her research has been published in top-tier refereed journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Psychological Science. Her research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Grant, and has also received numerous awards such as Best Paper awards from the OB section at the Academy of Management and the Canadian Psychological Association. Her research has been featured in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Huffington Post, and the Record, among others. Ivona is also a member of Editorial Board of a leading journal in emotion research: Emotion. She was honoured to be a keynote speaker at Gender, Diversity, and Inclusion Symposium at RMIT University, Melbourne, and has been invited to present her work worldwide (e.g., University of Western Australia, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University).

Ivona is also dedicated to the graduate student development and training. She leads the EDGE (Emotion, Diversity, and Gender Equity) lab where she works with a group of talented graduate and undergraduate students. For more details on the lab research projects please see the EDGE lab website [1].

She is also a very involved community member and she currently serves on a Board of Directors at Focus for Ethnic Women, a non-profit organization that empowers women by providing a nurturing, culturally sensitive environment that builds self-esteem, social networks, employment related skills, and connections to meaningful employment.

Abstract

Although sexist attitudes are generally thought to undermine support for employment equity (EE) policies supporting women, we argue that one form of sexism – benevolent sexism, i.e., subjectively positive attitudes toward women that characterizes women as wonderful, yet weak – may actually appear to increase support for EE policies by invoking a sense of compassion. Using samples of undergraduate students applying for co-operative jobs, in a correlational study (Study 1) where we measured benevolent sexism and an experiment where we primed benevolent sexist stereotypes (Study 2), we show that benevolent sexism is related to greater support for an EE policy and that this effect is mediated by compassion. In Study 3, we identify a key boundary condition of the positive effect of benevolent sexism: the type of position for which EE policies promote the hiring of women. In particular, we find that the positive effect of benevolent sexism on support for the EE policy via compassion extends only to EE policies that promote the hiring of women in more feminine, and not in more masculine, positions. In Study 4, we extend our Study 3 findings by examining a broader scope of masculine and feminine jobs in an employee sample. Thus while benevolent sexism may promote EE policies and appear to promote gender equality, it subtly undermines it by potentially contributing to occupational gender segregation. These findings suggest that benevolently sexist attitudes are in particular dangerous for gender equality because both men and women oftentimes do not perceive benevolent sexism as discrimination and thus its effects on gender equality may go unnoticed. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.