Thread by @MelaneeLThomas

🚨new article🚨from @jordanmansell4, @allisonrharell, me, and Tania Gosselin.

This is ANOTHER piece where I try and fail to explain women's levels of subjective self-evals like interest, efficacy, and ambition. But we find some other neat things!

link.springer.com/article/10.100…

Here, we're interested in the political consequences of losing at competition. We build on the idea that women are more competition-averse than men b/c women are, on average, more aware that, if you compete, you might do poorly or lose

We argue this may be one reason why women report lower levels of interest, efficacy, or ambition: they're more accurate, taking into account more possibilities than are men.

We prime this with an experiment. We get folks to do a task where they need to be both fast an accurate. There is a clear prize for top performers.

Our experimental manipulation is simply telling participants that they're bad at this.

We tell women they underperform compared to men, and men they underperform compared to women.

For women, this doesn't affect how they see themselves in politics. As in, hearing women aren't as good at a competitive task as men doesn't change women's levels of political interest

Maybe an explicitly political competition would, and that's where we're going next.

ANYWAY, it's men who are the interesting ones here, not women. We hypothesized that unlike women, men's levels of interest, efficacy, and ambition wouldn't change if they lost to women....

We thought we'd find backlash effects. Being told they lost to women, we thought, would make men more sexist, and more likely to prefer men's political leadership.

This is what we found.

What's particularly interesting is that we measure gender two different ways here. We ask folks to identify with a category, and we also ask them to rate themselves on two 0 to 100 scales: one that captures masculinity and another that captures femininity.

0 = I feel masculine/feminine 0% of the time
100 = I feel masculine/feminine 100% of the time.

We add to the growing literature that shows how folks who choose answers that line up with the binary (e.g., folks who identify as men who also say they are 0% feminine and 100% masculine) act differently than those who choose different answers on the 0-100 scales

Here, the strongest backlash -- so, higher sexism, greater preference for men in political leadership -- is from men who say they're 0% feminine/100% masculine. We find something similar, albeit less robust, from women who ID as 0% masculine and 100% feminine

One of my favourite parts of this piece is how it speaks to the need to add nuance to how we think about gendered effects. Many folks don't see themselves as 0s and 100s on those masculine/feminine scales. That has political consequences