The Influence of Sexual Orientation and Race on Gender Prescriptive Stereotypes with Sa-kiera Hudson

Gender stereotypes are powerful forces that shape collective expectations and are socialized from an early age; these stereotypes are not just descriptive, but also prescriptive, stating what sorts of things men and women should and should not do based on their gender.

Rule congruity theory helps to explain why these prescriptive stereotypes are often a source of backlash: men and women are evaluated negatively when the role that they occupy is incongruent with the stereotypes of their gender. Negative evaluations can come from both descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes – women can spark descriptive backlash in leadership roles if there are few other women in leadership, and prescriptive backlash if the traits she displays violates one’s notions of how women should behave.

Rule congruity theory has sparked a great deal of research, but researchers generally haven’t interrogated who or what we mean when we say “men” or “women.” Research on role congruity theory and gender generally presumes straight, white, middle-class individuals, which gives reason to believe that prescriptive stereotypes of women don’t fully encompass lesbian women or women of color.

Taking an intersectional perspective may reveal that societal expectations are unique based on other identities. Importantly, less than 20% of studies on race include women, and less than 10% of studies on gender include race: there is an enormous amount of work to be done in intersectional psychology.

The first WAPPP Seminar of the semester featured Sa-kiera Hudson, PhD Candidate in Psychology at Harvard University and WAPPP Fellow, presenting research on intersectional identities and gender stereotypes. In particular, Hudson questions whether rule congruity theory is adequate to explain intersectional identities and, if not, how the theory should be modified.

Study 1

Hudson’s first study incorporated sexual orientation as an additional identity. Existing literature suggests that in the realm of stereotypes, gay men and straight women are presumed to be similar, as are lesbian women and straight men, because of their similar sexual preferences.

In this study, individuals were given a list of 70 traits, some of which were more stereotypically masculine, feminine, or neutral (e.g. “assertive,” “warm and kind,” “honest”), and asked to rate whether that trait was desirable for straight and gay men and women, for men and women without a sexual orientation identifier, and for straight or gay people, without specifying gender.

Hudson hypothesized three expected patterns: stability in gender stereotypes, evidence of heterocentrism, and evidence of gender inversion.

1. Stability in gender stereotypes: Hudson’s findings were substantially the same as a similar study from 2002, which indicates that prescriptive gender stereotypes are relatively stable and haven’t changed much in the last 15 years.

2. Evidence of heterocentrism: There was no trait for which respondents’ rankings of desirable traits for a “man” deviated from those for a “straight man,” nor “woman” from “straight woman” or “person” from “straight person.” This finding suggests that when individuals are rating a person without a sexual orientation identifier, they presume straightness. While this isn’t surprising, it is useful: very few studies directly demonstrate heteronormativity in judgments like these.

3. Gender inversion: Hudson expected to see evidence of gender inversion, similarities between gay men and straight women and between lesbian women and straight men, in addition to differences between gay and straight men that mirror the differences between straight men and straight women. Of the 70 traits, there was evidence of gender inversion for 9: for example, it was less desirable for straight women to be assertive compared to straight men, but more desirable for lesbian women to be assertive compared to gay men.

An additional 12 traits showed evidence of gender asymmetry, where desirability ratings for men or women were the same regardless of sexual orientation, but diverged for the opposite gender. For example, cleanliness was equally desirable for gay and straight men, but for women, there was more pressure for straight women to be clean than for lesbian women. Thirty-four traits displayed evidence of sexual orientation asymmetry – there was gender differentiation for straight and gay men and women, but no difference between gay men and lesbian women. This finding suggests that gender might not matter as much as sexual orientation in terms of how we perceive gay men and lesbian women.

In addition, Hudson presented three other interesting wrinkles from this study:

• It is more desirable for lesbians to be assertive, competitive, and forceful compared to straight women, but there was no difference in trait desirability for business sense, career-oriented, or leadership ability, which suggests that it is acceptable for lesbian women to display dominant personality traits, but not in ways that might disturb the status quo of gender hierarchy.
• The differences between straight and gay men are much larger than the differences between straight and lesbian women, which suggests that gay men may lose some of the status that comes with being male by virtue of their sexual orientation, while lesbian women don’t gain much status above that accorded to straight women.
• Finally, Hudson’s study revealed some evidence that homosexuality is associated with low status – study respondents found it less desirable for gay men and lesbian women to be loyal, dependable, honest, or enthusiastic, traits that are typically considered neutral and positive. 

Study 2

Hudson’s second study replicated the first study’s methods using race rather than sexual orientation. There are different stereotypes of men and women of different races; for example, white women are stereotyped as submissive and feminine, black women as confident and aggressive. What studies do exist demonstrate that black and white women are treated differently with respect to normative traits – black women are not sanctioned as heavily for “aggressive leadership behaviors” as black men and white women. Something about the interaction of race and gender stereotypes specific to black women may mediate backlash.

Just as in the first study, Hudson found stability of gender stereotypes over time and evidence of eurocentrism: when respondents rated traits for a person without a race marker, their answers most closely matched those given for white individuals, suggesting that they viewed white as the default.

Hudson initially hypothesized that this study would yield evidence of gendered race theory, which posits that black individuals are masculinized. However, the results produced limited evidence for gendered race theory! For black men, it was less desirable to be masculine and more desirable to be feminine compared to the control male target. For black women, it was less desirable to be feminine and more desirable to be masculine compared to the control female target, suggesting that both black men and women are distanced from their gender stereotypes. For 38 traits, there was little gender differentiation among black targets but a significant amount for white targets, again suggesting that gender is not as important as race for stereotypes regarding men and women of color.

Both of these studies revealed that the prescriptive norms for gays and lesbians and for black men and women are mostly feminized norms, which suggests that status might play a role in how gender prescriptive stereotypes are generated for intersectional targets – these stereotypes are less about gender per se and more about relative status. The results of these studies underscore just how much intersectionality matters for contemporary research and the importance of updating existing theories accordingly.

Intersectionality and Women’s Health: Sexual Orientation, Race/Ethnicity, and Cervical Cancer Screening with Madina Agénor

Over the last few years, there has been a significant increase in public health literature that employs an intersectional approach. Intersectionality is an analytical tool that allows us to more accurately describe how human experience is shaped by multiple forms of social inequality that act in diverse and mutually reinforcing ways. This week’s WAPPP seminar featured Madina Agénor, Assistant Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Professor Agénor presented her research on how sexual orientation and race/ethnicity simultaneously affect disparities in cervical cancer screening among U.S. women.

Professor Agénor presented the results of three studies to demonstrate how intersectionality matters for population health and health equity. The first study examines how sexual orientation affects cervical cancer screenings without using an intersectional approach, and the second does the same for race/ethnicity. The third study employs an intersectional approach to illuminate how sexual orientation and race/ethnicity interact to produce discrepancies in cervical cancer screening.

Sexual orientation and cervical cancer screenings 
Lesbian and bisexual women (collectively referred to here as “sexual minority women”) are less likely to receive cervical cancer screenings and routine gynecological care than heterosexual women. Women with female sexual partners may also be more susceptible to cervical cancer because of higher rates of smoking and HPV. In addition, sexual minority women face a number of barriers to healthcare, including lower average income, lack of access to regular care and health insurance, and discrimination in society and in the healthcare system.

However, sexual minority women’s health is an understudied area, and there are significant gaps in research, including overreliance on convenience samples of mostly white, college-educated women; problems with measurement of sexual orientation (some studies conflate sexual orientation identity with sexual behavior); lack of appropriate comparison groups; and limited attention to potential drivers of sexual orientation disparities in pap testing.

Professor Agénor’s research uses a national probability sample of U.S. women, operationalizes sexual attraction, sexual orientation identity, and sexual behavior as different components of sexual orientation, uses appropriate comparison groups for each component of sexual orientation, and assesses whether healthcare factors (including access to insurance, receiving contraception, and STI services use) contribute to sexual orientation disparities in pap testing.

Lesbian-identified women exhibited significantly lower pap test use compared to heterosexual women (43% versus 69%), as did women with only female sexual partners compared to women with only male sexual partners (46% versus 71%). These disparities persisted even after controlling for age, household income, and other similar factors. Interestingly, differences in healthcare factors – access to health insurance, contraception, and STI services use – completely attenuated this disparity. According to the results of this study, focusing on only sexual orientation without an intersectional lens, healthcare factors may explain the discrepancy in cervical cancer screening among sexual minority women.

Race/Ethnicity and cervical cancer
In 2012, incidence of cervical cancer was highest among black and Latinx women, and cervical cancer mortality was three times higher among black women than white women. However, there has only been one subnational population-based study on sexual orientation, race/ethnicity, and pap test use, and this study also lacked appropriate comparison groups and didn’t seek out the drivers of disparities. Again using a national probability sample, Professor Agénor examined sexuality, race/ethnicity, and healthcare factors across racial and ethnic groups within sexual minority groups.

Professor Agénor found a lower prevalence of pap test use among women with only female sexual partners for black and white women, with the greatest disparity in pap test use between white women with only female partners and white women with only male partners. There was no difference in pap test use among Latinx women, regardless of whether they had male or female sexual partners. Importantly, the results of this study indicate that healthcare factors completely attenuated the disparity between women with female sexual partners and women with male sexual partners for white women only.

The magnitude and mechanisms of sexual orientation disparities in pap testing vary by race, which we wouldn’t have known without employing an intersectional approach. The crucial implications of this study are that addressing healthcare access barriers may mitigate disparities for some but not all women, and that we should be wary of “one-size-fits-all” interventions.

Qualitative Intersectional Study 
In order to better understand the mechanism of these effects on black sexual minority women, Professor Agénor held focus group discussions that centered around four key themes: healthcare provider communication style, heteronormative healthcare provider assumptions, heterosexism, racism, and classism, and healthcare provider background.

• Participants preferred healthcare providers who took time to build relationships, were knowledgeable about sexual minority women’s health, and provided them with relevant sexual health information. 
• Many participants reported that their healthcare providers assumed heterosexuality, and therefore provided patients with limited relevant sexual health information. Similarly, many participants reported both a fear of disclosing their sexual orientation to healthcare providers and negative experiences when they did so. 
• Many participants reported that their healthcare providers made social class assumptions based on their race/ethnicity. Some healthcare providers made further assumptions based on perceived social class about their patients’ ability to understand health information, which affected both how they communicated with them and how they involved them in decision making. 
• Participants reported negative experiences with OB/GYNs and expressed a preference for nurses and physician assistants, who provided more individualized attention. Finally, respondents reported a preference for healthcare providers with similar lived experiences, particularly for black sexual minority women healthcare providers. 

The results of this study indicate that patient-provider communication may be an important contributor to sexual orientation disparities in pap test use among black women. Sexual orientation and race influence black sexual minority women’s pap testing experiences and outcomes by shaping their exposure to multiple forms of discrimination and their access to and rapport with healthcare providers. Interventions designed for black sexual minority women should address multiple forms of discrimination and will have to look different than interventions designed for white sexual minority women.

Whether or not we employ an intersectional approach can be critical for designing appropriate interventions to promote health. Intersectionality matters for population health and health equity.

Race in Your Face

This will be uncomfortable, so try to relax. Examining our own race and gender stereotypes can be as pleasant as sitting in the dentist’s chair. But for Kerri L. Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA, discovering awkward truths about people’s biases is an occupational hazard. Dr. Johnson investigates how people use physical cues to categorize other people.  Sometimes she even gets hate mail and coverage by Rush Limbaugh.

At the Social Communication Lab at UCLA, Dr. Johnson and her social psychologist colleagues do things like asking students to decide whether a point-light display figure is a man or woman and to categorize faces of different races as male, female, gay or straight. They even have a program that analyzes the relative femininity or masculinity of a person’s face.  Despite the ill-informed hate mail, the researchers persist, because understanding how biases are formed is the first step to combating unfair stereotypes and discrimination. 

In one study, Dr. Johnson demonstrated that race is gendered. For example, in the United States, there is overlap in stereotypes of Asians and women (soft-spoken, shy, family-oriented), while the stereotypes about Blacks overlap with stereotypes about men (dominant, athletic, competitive). The same pattern surfaced when the researchers measured whether respondents were more likely to misidentify the Asian men’s faces as female and Black women’s faces as male. The faces in question were digitally created so that only the race varied (see above). Sure enough, subjects more quickly and more correctly identified the Black men and Asian women than the other way around, and the respondents’ own race or gender did not seem to make a difference.   

The Social Communication Lab runs dozens of similar experiments, finding, for example, that even when information was limited to just photos of faces, subjects were better than chance at categorizing the person as “gay” or “straight.” And, as another angry-letter-provoking study demonstrated, categorizing someone, whether by race, gender or sexual orientation, has implications for how we will interact with that person given our own baggage and biases.

Yet it was a study of politicians and gender that achieved notoriety and misrepresentation by both Samantha Bee at the New York Times and Rush Limbaugh. The conclusions of the study were that Republican women in Congress had more stereotypical feminine facial features than did their Democratic counterparts; and that uninformed observers were more likely to identify the highly feminine women’s faces as Republican and the less feminine ones as Democratic.

You can take a moment to learn about the methods used in this unexpectedly controversial study, and even start another uncomfortable discussion in the comments section here. Please, just go easy on the hate mail.

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.