"Benevolent Sexism and Support of Romantic Partner’s Goals: Undermining Women’s Competence While Fulfilling Men’s Intimacy Needs"

"Men who endorsed benevolent sexism provided more dependency-oriented support, including directly providing plans and solutions and neglecting the recipient’s own abilities, which led to their female partners feeling less competent and less positively regarded. In contrast, women who endorsed benevolent sexism provided greater relationship-oriented support, characterized by affection and emphasizing the positive relationship outcomes associated with their partner’s goals, which led their male partners to perceive greater regard and intimacy in their relationship. This study is the first to investigate how benevolent sexism prompts naturalistic support behaviors that can impede women’s capacity for independent success while supporting the fulfillment of men’s intimacy needs...

Benevolent sexism works through expression of affection rather than aggression, including characterizing men’s social power as a chivalrous agreement to care for and cherish women... Benevolent sexism fosters women’s acceptance of social inequalities by presenting an idyllic version of traditional heterosexual relationships in which men hold the role as provider and protector and women adopt a caring role managing the relationship and domestic domains... in addition to promoting relationship intimacy, benevolent sexism operates to maintain men’s societal power by undermining women’s personal competence and efficacy...

Importantly, the current results also affirm that benevolent sexism does this in covert ways. The support patterns that arise from benevolent sexism place men in a high-status role and women in a relationship-focused dependent role, and do so without these outcomes being necessarily intended by providers. Given that this sample comprised long-term, relatively satisfied and committed couples, it is likely that men’s and women’s support behaviors were intended to help their partner’s goal."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26160333

I love that this experiment examined sexism in both men and women, recognizing that the oppressed group can often internalize that oppression.

Learning about benevolent sexism was such an important thing for me in understanding the world. It's all about creating a system where people get to avoid the social stigma of being labelled sexist, but don't have to do the real work of changing their views of the world, and in fact are congratulated for their behavior. Frustratingly, our society says that thinking this way is how to help women, so benevolent sexist attitudes and behaviors often arise from positive intentions held by good people, but it clearly doesn't benefit the people it's supposedly designed to benefit.

This - "people tend to provide dependency-oriented support when they encounter seemingly low-status people in need of help by providing solutions and plans for recipients rather than working alongside recipients to help build the “tools” needed to reach a solution!

!!

And "This highlights the critical role of benevolent sexism in suppressing women’s independent abilities in egalitarian nations, where hostile sexism is ineffective at gaining compliance from female partners"

(credit to DK)

Related: Colorblindness if bad for non-white people [benevolent racism?]