Motive: 4. The need for status

Sexism - meanness in inter-gender relations directed at women - is traditionally attributed to men. It comes in two packages. Hostile sexism is defined as “antipathy towards women who are viewed as usurping men’s power.” Benevolent sexism, on the other hand, is “subjectively favourable, chivalrous ideology that offers protection and affection to women who embrace conventional roles.” Either way, the intent is a stinging set-down for women. It may surprise some that men are not its only practitioners; women also partake of this gender-based prejudice.

In India, of course, hostility within gender is not at all new. The virulent mother-in-law – daughter-in-law dyad has been the subject of poignant human stories and movie masala in equal measure over decades, if not centuries, of organized social life. It prevailed during the joint family social structure and carried over into the now nuclear units of the extended family.

Erstwhile close-knit families continue to blame the fissions in their generational relationships on the machinations of newly wedded wives (and their families of origin). Mothers complain that marriages of grown-up sons doom the cohesive mother-son bonds, and make them outsiders in their offspring’s lives. Daughters-in-law are suspected of using witchcraft to bind the men. In fact it is commonly said that it would be less astonishing to be told that two suns have risen in the sky than to hear that two women are able to live amicably under the same roof!

Women have been at the receiving end of abuse at the hands of their husbands through the ages in most patriarchal cultures. The social expectation has been to ‘discipline’ of wives in displays of authority, domination and control, or be accused of being under their thumb or worse, unmanly. Albeit on a lower scale, even in this new millennium of equal opportunity, reports abide around this country and the world of domestic violence, and dowry attacks, torture and death. 

The hope is forlorn that sexism is on the downturn in developed and developing nations. Gender inequality thrives almost everywhere in a form not immediately recognizable as such - benevolent sexism. The image of this behavioural type, translated from an Indian vernacular, would be the “knife of sugar-candy” that spreads insidious sweetness as it stabs (the spirit). The thin veneer of protectiveness overlays the motivation to keeping women off-balance, dependent and inferior. 

Glick and Fiske theorize that:

…this term [benevolent sexism] recognizes that some forms of sexism are, for the perpetrator, subjectively benevolent, characterizing women as pure creatures who ought to be protected, supported and adored and whose love is necessary to make a man complete. This idealization of women simultaneously implies that they are weak and best suited for conventional gender roles…

The “cherishing” of femininity is calculated to erode women’s resistance to the inequality and ensure that they remain in gilded cages happily admiring their chains. Many of these women insist that when their husbands/protectors treat them like queens, why on earth should they want for anything other than more of the same?

From their survey findings from about 15,000 respondents in nineteen countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and America, the researchers say that sexist beliefs are consistent across cultures. Gender prejudice is universal. Benevolent sexism is complementary to the hostile form and is perhaps the civilized face that set women a high bar for acceptance.

The sexist standard in the Indian scenario is the traditional pedestal of motherhood. A woman lives up to this ideal when she extends the unquestioning lovingness and nurturance associated with the mother-image into the marital household. She earns further social approval when she also delivers the male heir. In the process, she shapes into conformity; her individual identity becoming indistinguishable from the family she is married into. In earlier times, her given name too was reset to match.

Women in India have largely been looked upon as secondary to men and dependent on them for their identity. Times have changed somewhat with education and employment. In tune with feminine groups elsewhere, women of (Asian) Indian origins attempt to be in control of their creative potentials, and distance from stereotypical roles of simply nurturing hierarchy in the family and the organization. They disapprove of and reject the traditional hostile sexism. They are also more supportive of other women.

However, conflicts arise when persisting patriarchal attitudes collide with gender equality. The female drive to be assertive unsettles the status quo, and resistance from conservative family members and male colleagues receives tacit social support. Women themselves vacillate between orthodoxy and modernity, between traditional care-giving roles and the need to self-actualise.

Indeed the women’s interpersonal relations appear inconsistent and gender-based. They are empathetic with women, although they despise womanhood as weak and lesser than. This ambivalence is stark in work organizations, especially private or multi-national concerns, where attrition rates for women from entry to top management levels are also significant. Moreover, many women adopt the ‘masculine’ approach to decision-making, internalising the traditional (male) attitudes and standards of action.

The researchers say further that:

Dominant groups prefer to act warmly toward subordinates, offering them patronizing affection as a reward for “knowing their place” rather than rebelling. Open antagonism is reserved for subordinates who fail to defer or who question existing social inequalities.

A sisterhood characterized by “subordination and affection” is not quite genuine, but rather a disarming “reward” to reinforce the discrimination. By patronizing those even less favoured, women perhaps seek to raise their own diminished self-esteem. 

Their perpetration of subtle prejudice may in fact be a defence mechanism. Fischer speculated that:

…women’s benevolent sexist attitudes may be, in part, a self-protective response to environments they perceive as hostile to women.

In the study she conducted, women subjects were assigned to one of three groups at random. The experimental conditions of the groups differed only in the information that was given to each.  One group was told that studies show that men hold negative attitudes towards women. Another was informed that men’s attitudes towards women have been found to be positive. The third was told that men’s attitudes have been investigated but given no further details. Findings showed that the group that was made aware of men’s negative attitudes responded with the “strongest benevolent sexist attitudes.”

In regions where male hostile sexism is high, female benevolent sexism follows suit to also be high. Fischer explains the phenomena as:  

…some small bit of protest against the hostile attitudes, along with hope of reward for at least some members of the group (i.e., the right kind of women).

In other words, by exerting control over those lower on the totem pole, women indirectly justify and come to terms with their own need for status in the social hierarchy, precisely as the system’s dominant males would want it to be. Women as a group thus continue to be ‘invisible’ while the consequent emotional stress they are burdened with takes toll on their health and performances. 

Women need to reassess their conceptual premises, and understand how the standard received wisdom they have obediently swallowed so far hurts them as individual and group.  They need to reason with their emotions (not against them), and resurrect their suppressed identity. They need to perceive one another as real people, rather than caretaker tools for the traditional hierarchical system. And finally, they need to step up from the shadows and manage control of their own lives as the lead characters of the act.

References for this post: 

1. Fischer, Ann R. “WOMEN’S BENEVOLENT SEXISM AS REACTION TO HOSTILITY” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30 (2006), 410-416, 2006. 
2. Glick, Peter and Fiske, Susan T. “An Ambivalent Alliance”. American Psychologist. Vol. 56, No. 2, 109-118. February 2001.