Mary E. Kite

Sex Differences in Attitudes Toward Homosexual Persons, Behaviors, and Civil Rights A Meta-Analysis

Meta-analytic techniques were used to compare mens and womens attitudes toward homosexual persons, homosexual behaviors, and gay peoples civil rights. As expected, size of sex differences varied across these categories. Men were more negative than women toward homosexual persons and homosexual behavior, but the sexes viewed gay civil rights similarly. Mens attitudes toward homosexual persons were particularly negative when the person being rated was a gay man or of unspecified sex. Women and men evaluated lesbians similarly. Ratings of homosexual persons and homosexual behavior were least likely to differ by subject sex for samples of nonprofessional adults. In addition, sex role attitude mediated sex differences in attitudes toward homosexuality. Biases in the research literature and areas that deserve further attention, such as the confounding of sample with measurement strategy and the tendency to study gay men or targets of unspecified sex, are discussed.

GENDER BELIEF SYSTEMS: HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE IMPLICIT INVERSION THEORY

Beliefs about the characteristics of male and female homosexuals and heterosexuals were assessed to determine the degree to which stereotypes of homosexuals are consistent with the inversion model proposed by Freud (1905) and others, i.e., the assumption that homosexuals are similar to the opposite-sex heterosexual. Results showed that people do subscribe to an implicit inversion theory wherein male homosexuals are believed to be similar to female heterosexuals, and female homosexuals are believed to be similar to male heterosexuals. These results offer additional support for a bipolar model of gender stereotyping, in which masculinity and femininity are assumed to be in opposition.

Are stereotypes of nationalities applied to both women and men

Stereotypes of women, men, and nationalities of 28 countries were examined to determine the extent to which stereotypes of nationalities are applied to women as well as to men. As expected, stereotypes of the men tended to resemble stereotypes of their nationalities more than did stereotypes of the women. Yet this greater similarity between stereotypes of men and their nationalities than between stereotypes of women and their nationalities was more pronounced to the extent that countries were unfavorably evaluated. Interpretation of these findings followed from a social structural theory of stereotype content and focused on the relative status of women and men in modern nations.

Clustering and Gender Schemata An Uncertain Link

Following the procedures of Bem (1981), an attempt was made to replicate the relationship between the assumed use of a gender schema as indexed by scores on the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the clustering of gender-related words in recall. Although comparable levels of overall clustering were obtained, there was no observable relationship between the masculinity and femininity scales of the BSRI, combined in a number of different ways, and indices of gender-related clustering. Both methodological and conceptual issues are discussed.

(Some) Things Are Different Now: An Optimistic Look at Sexual Prejudice.

During my first year as an undergraduate, I received a letter from one of my best friends from high school. The woman she was seeing had broken her heart and she had no one to tell, so she took a chance and told me. There was a risk in doing so because I did not know she was a lesbian and she could not be sure how I would react. I can no longer remember what I wrote back, but I know that after she got my letter, she sent me flowers and a thank you card. In the late 1970s, and especially in the Midwestern United States where I grew up, people rarely talked about being gay and, when they did, it was often to speculate about whether an unmarried woman was a lesbian or whether an effeminate man was gay. But, as is true for many people, when I heard my friend’s news, the only thing that mattered was that she needed my support. Receiving those flowers brought home how afraid she must have been to write to me and that people did, and still do, turn aside years of friendship and sever family ties when they learn someone is gay. This realization ultimately led to an undergraduate research project on antigay prejudice, to my master’s thesis on the behavioral consequences of homophobia (both summarized in Kite & Deaux, 1986) and to the article that I recently learned has been among the most cited in Psychology of Women Quarterly (PWQ) over its first 35 years: ‘‘Gender Belief Systems: Homosexuality and the Implicit Inversion Theory’’ (Kite & Deaux, 1987). Please find the original article at pwq.sagepub.com/content/11/1/83. My flowers arrived two decades after Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian political and social organization in the United States and not quite a decade after the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village. They came years after Evelyn Hooker’s (e.g., Hooker, 1957) courageous work demonstrating that mental illness was not more prevalent in gay than in heterosexual men—research that played a critically important role in the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Things were different then. What was also different was that few psychologists were studying sexual prejudice or what continues to be widely referred to as homophobia, despite the many critiques pointing to the limitations of that term (e.g., Herek, 2000). I owe Kay Deaux a debt of gratitude for many reasons, but especially for her willingness to support my research at a time when social scientists were just beginning to view societal attitudes toward sexual minorities as a form of social prejudice, similar to racism and sexism (see Pettit, 2011). Our collaboration on the PWQ article extended her highly influential work on the gender belief system and, in particular, her landmark studies on the multidimensionality of gender-associated beliefs (Deaux & Lewis, 1984). Without her encouragement and insights, it is highly unlikely that I would have pursued my interest in antigay prejudice.