Women with disabilities

Stereotypes of women and people with disabilities can be a source of discrimination. Recent models of social judgments distinguish between two main dimensions of stereotypes – warmth (i.e., sociability, morality) and competence (i.e., motivation, ability to achieve objectives). In the present study, we used Louvet and Rohmer’s (2010) paradigm to test the effect of the intersection of gender and disability on social judgments of a person’s warmth, competence, and a third dimension of stereotypes – courage. Participants judged men, women, or people (target of unspecified gender) who had or who did not have a physical disability. The results showed that both men with disabilities and women (with and without disabilities) were considered less competent but warmer than men without disabilities. Additionally, courage was a core dimension of judgments of the targets with disabilities: All the targets with disabilities were judged as more courageous than the targets without disabilities. We discuss these results in the light of previous studies of stereotypes and of the social status of discriminated groups. Perceiving women and people with disabilities as courageous but not competent is a way of justifying social discrimination, including workplace discrimination.