If you study adults who marry over the course of many years, starting before they marry and continuing afterwards, will you find that after marrying, they become less sexist? University of Auckland researcher Nikola C. Overall and two of her colleagues did that study. For 14 years (2009-2023), they followed 1,615 adults from a nationally representative study of New Zealanders who got married (and were not gay or lesbian).
They reported their findings this month (August 2024) in the journal Sex Roles in “Is marriage associated with decreases or increases in sexism?” They did not make a prediction as to whether people would become more or less sexist after they married, but they admitted that they hoped that men who married would express less hostile sexism than they did when they were single.
However, that’s not what happened. In the first year after they married, the men became more sexist, as evidenced by their responses to a measure of hostile sexism. A strength of the study was that women’s sexism was measured as well as men’s. In the year after they first got married, women expressed more hostile sexism too.
The authors define hostile sexism as involving “antagonistic attitudes towards women who challenge men’s social power and fears that women will gain power by exploiting men’s dependence in intimate relationships.” Hostile sexism is measured by agreement with statements such as:
Another variety of sexism, benevolent sexism, “involves patronizing attitudes that women’s warm, tender........