Abstract
The traditional stereotype of the typical woman has been described as “nice, but incompetent.” However, such general gender stereotypes are applied to individual targets only under certain conditions: They are used to “fill in the blanks” (Heilman, 2012) if little personal information is provided about a target. “Typical lesbians” are regarded to have more typically masculine (agentic) characteristics such as task competence than the typical woman does. We thus hypothesized that if a woman displays behavior coinciding with the stereotype of the typical woman, it is more readily interpreted as stereotypically female if performed by a heterosexual woman than by a lesbian. Participants (N = 296) read a hypothetical job interview in which we manipulated the target’s sexual orientation (between subjects). Findings demonstrated that a lesbian was judged as more competent than a heterosexual woman in the presence of behavior that may be interpreted as gender-stereotypical (Experiments 1 and 2). This difference in competence judgments was not found in the absence of gender-stereotypical behavior (Experiment 1). Judging the heterosexual woman as low in masculinity was related to a judgment of lower competence (Experiment 2). Our findings demonstrate that there are conditions under which lesbians, a group often stereotyped negatively, are less susceptible to invoking negative female stereotypes than heterosexual women are.
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Notes
All materials are available from the first or second author upon request.
No statistically significant effects on communion were obtained in the present research; items and findings are available from the authors upon request.
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Acknowledgments
Parts of this research were presented at the Conference of the European Academy of Management, Valencia, Spain, June 4–7, 2014. The writing of this article was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation to the second and last authors (DFG STE 938/11-1). We thank Marcel Cattarius and Erin Thompson for valuable comments on a previous version of this article.
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Niedlich, C., Steffens, M.C., Krause, J. et al. Ironic Effects of Sexual Minority Group Membership: Are Lesbians Less Susceptible to Invoking Negative Female Stereotypes than Heterosexual Women?. Arch Sex Behav 44, 1439–1447 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0412-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-014-0412-1