Counteracting Subconscious Gender Discrimination - A Study on Perspective-taking and Perceived Competence as Mediating Variables in Interpersonal Communication
Abstract: Over the years, gender equality has been gaining ground in all aspects of society, as more and more people realize its importance, and the value it brings. Today, understanding, and counteracting, gender discrimination lies in the interest of not only those being discriminated against. Legislations might prevent discriminatory actions, but counteracting structural gender discrimination requires an understanding of people's subconscious discriminatory behaviour. Prior research has found that people (both women and men) discriminate against women by not allowing them to influence their memory on public world topics in the Saying-Is-Believing paradigm, supposedly due to their lower perceived competence. This study sets out to (i) counteract this discrimination against women by investigating perspective-taking as a non-discriminatory method, and (ii) examine perceived competence's role in gender discrimination. An experimental research method, based on the Saying-Is-Believing paradigm, is applied on a population of Swedish high school students, in order to make comparisons between participants who have received treatments with those in the control group. In contrast to prior research, discriminatory behaviour against women is only found among men. In counteracting this, perspective-taking is found to be a non-discriminatory method for participants who report high levels of empathic feelings as a result of the perspective-taking instructions. Lastly, different levels of perceived competence among women does not affect people's willingness to allow women to influence their memory in the Saying-Is-Believing paradigm.
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