Abstract:

The massive incorporation of women into the educational system and the labor market in the last decades could lead us misleadingly to see the reality in a very optimistic way. The reality is that women, despite their excellent qualifications comparable to that of men, are still in a discriminatory situation in comparison to men. Growing literature analyses the underlying processes to shed light to this problem, and the explanations that has received the most attention from researchers are the existence of gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes in our society. People associate communal qualities (e.g., nice, compassionate) with women, while agentic qualities (e.g., assertive, competitive) are more linked to men, which precisely are considered as requirements for success in labour world. The aim of this study is to analyze whether there are differences in how men and women are perceived (i.e., which are their characteristics traits) and also to explore the possible effect of sexism on these perceptions. The sample is composed of 200 Spanish university students (n = 110 men and n = 90 women). The results show that there are significant differences in how women and men in general are perceived in terms of their characteristic traits nowadays. In the majority of the attributes women in general are perceived in a feminine way, while men are viewed in a masculine way, in accordance to gender stereotypes. In addition, there are some statistical differences in these perceptions in function of the degree of sexist attitudes among the participants. In particular, those students who scored lower in sexism attribute some typical masculine traits to women. On the contrary, those students who scored higher in sexism attribute typical feminine traits to women. In the case of perceptions about men, the students who scored lower in sexism attribute one typical feminine trait to men, while those students who scored higher in sexism attribute typical masculine traits to men. It is interesting to highlight that perceptions about women are less favorably than the perceptions about men. Those findings suggest the important weight of gender stereotypes and the prejudice against women in our society. The implications of the results for education, university teaching-learning process, future research guidelines, and limitations of the study are also discussed.

Keywords:

Gender stereotypes, sexism, university students.