Unequal to Inequitable: Identity Trade-offs & Women’s Views on Gender Inequality

• In Event: The Pull of Tradition: When Women Challenge, or Resist, Change

Abstract

Under what conditions do women recognize gender inequality in the household and labor force as inequitable and demand policies for redressal? Existing research employing an intersectional lens suggests that partisan, class, religious and racial identities that overlap with gender shape levels of “gender consciousness” and collective identification with a feminist group identity among women. Building on this understanding, we hypothesize that the perception of a tradeoff between multiple identities--distinct from the existence of multiple identities alone--has explanatory power for understanding women’s views of their own life experiences, self-concept, and policy preferences. Specifically, we explore (1) the extent to which women perceive a trade-off between a feminist group identity and other overlapping identities, and (2) how the perception of such a trade-off shapes two main outcomes of interest: a) recognition of personal experiences in the home and workplace as inequitable and b) support for policy redressal of gender inequality. Using a nationally representative survey of American adult women, we investigate these questions by developing a novel measure of perceived identity trade-offs and by experimentally testing whether cues that (de)emphasize trade-offs between gender and other collective identities shift these outcomes.

Authors

• Albert Fang, Yale University

• Annabelle Hutchinson, Yale University

• Sarah Khan, Yale University