"Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men?"
On the off chance I haven't posted enough politically incorrect stuff here the past while, I was reminded today by an article on the fall of one one individual of a journal paper I encountered a while back. It's title? Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men? From an APA summary of the article:
Women are nearly five times more likely to show an automatic preference for their own gender than men are to show such favoritism for their own gender
The abstract of the study itself mentions the following:
... for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women.
That latter bit seems to assert that men will suck up in an attempt to get in womens' pants... which is where the fall of Hugo Schwyzer, a male women's studies professor, comes into play. In an interview with him you find the following:
I think primarily I wrote for women. I designed my writing primarily for women. One of the things that I figured out is the best way to get attention from women was not to describe women’s own experience to them because they found that patronizing and offensive. Instead it was to appear to challenge other men, to turn other men into the kind of boyfriend material, father material, or husband material that women so desperately wanted. ...
But on some level you were telling an audience what they wanted to hear knowing that women were reading it and not men?
Exactly. I always wrote for women but wrote in a really backhanded way where it appeared I was writing for men so that it would not appear too presumptuous and instead it would make me look better. And that required presenting myself as the ideal husband, father, and reformed bad boy.
My point is that I was writing for women because I wanted validation from women. The way to get validation from women was to present an idealized picture of what is possible for men.
Going back to that journal article I pointed out at the beginning of the article, here's a bit of the text (in which I've hyperlinked non-gated copies of the sources cited to illustrate that it's not just these particular researchers which have picked up on this):
men are less likely than women to show automatic ingroup bias (i.e., own gender preference). Whereas women strongly prefer female gender when response latency techniques are used, men typically show neutral gender attitudes (i.e., nonsignificant preference for either gender; Nosek & Banaji, 2002; Richeson & Ambady, 2001)
Amongst the conclusions that this would seem to lead to is that not discriminating on the basis of gender basis leads to non-gender-neutral results or, stated the other way, that gender discrimination might achieve more-gender-neutral results.