Underestimating sexism: Is gender categorization key?

In everyday life it can be controversial whether gender-based discrimination (i.e., sexism) has occurred or not. Claims of sexism are sometimes doubted, rejected, or cause backlash. The main aim of the present research was to investigate whether sexism is (relatively) underestimated. We experimentally tested whether instances of sexism are regarded as less discriminatory than the same instances involving racism, another prevalent form of discrimination (total N = 912). We developed a scenario measure to assess whether observers consider a wide range of everyday scenarios as more discriminatory in the context of sexism compared to racism as a reference category. Six experiments tested this with German and U.S. participants ( N 1 = 140; N 2 = 38; N 3 = 181; N 4 = 190; N 5 = 167; N 6 = 196). When the same scenarios described sexism, they were evaluated as less discriminatory than when they described racism against Black people (Exp. 1–4, mini meta-analysis, Exp. 6). This effect generalized to a different reference category (i.e., racism against Turkish people in Germany, Exp. 5). Delineating why sexism is regarded as less discriminatory than racism, we (a) found that perceiving sexism scenarios as less discriminatory than racism was consistently correlated with gender-related, not racism-related beliefs (specifically, endorsement of gender categorization and gender essentialism). A meta-analysis of each scenario (of Exp. 1–4) and Experiment 6 suggested that distinguishing “different” from “discriminatory” may be more difficult in the gender than race context. We discuss in how far acceptance of categorization may be key to ongoing discrimination.