Implicit Sexism and Reproductive Rights

• In Event: Gendered Attitudes and Women’s Interests

Abstract

A wealth of public opinion research demonstrates that party identification and religious beliefs are strongly associated with Americans’ support for abortion. There is a less consistent link between gender attitudes and reproductive rights attitudes. In this paper, we extend the existing research on gender attitudes and reproductive rights by investigating how both explicit and implicit gender attitudes shape support for abortion rights. We also consider a broader set of attitudes about reproductive rights beyond abortion. In Study 1, we use observational data to differentiate between hostile and modern sexism and how they relate to opinions on abortion. In Study 2, we use a high-quality web panel with more extensive batteries of questions tapping sexist attitude, an implicit attitude test (IAT) to tap nonconscious beliefs about gender roles, and a broader measure of reproductive rights that includes attitudes on abortion and birth control access. In Study 3, we leverage the use of physiological data in the form of skin conductance to obtain an unobtrusive measure of sexism that is not subject to desirability bias. We find a robust connection between sexist attitudes and attitudes about women’s reproductive rights, but these refined measures offer evidence that hostile sexist attitudes have a stronger connection to reproductive rights than do benevolent sexist attitudes, and that implicit gender bias motivates opposition to birth control access, above and beyond explicitly held sexist beliefs. This work illustrates how the various manifestations of sexism have different implications for attitudes about women’s reproductive rights.

Author

• Claire Gothreau, Rutgers University