How Women and Men Should (Not) Be: Gender Rules and Their Alignment With Status Beliefs Across Nations

Abstract

Gender rules, that is, prescriptive and proscriptive gender stereotypes, dictate how women and men should and should not be, and thereby perpetuate the gender hierarchy that privileges men over women. Across seven nations that span the continuum of gender equality, we investigated gender status norms by identifying the extent to which gender rules correspond with social status beliefs. As expected, in all investigated nations, participants (N = 4,327) believed that men should not show low-status traits reflecting weakness (e.g., weak, naive) but should show high-status traits reflecting agency (e.g., leadership ability, ambitious). Correlational analyses found that the more gender-equal a nation, the more men's agency prescriptions were aligned with high-status and their weakness proscriptions with low-status characteristics. Moreover, participants believed that women should not show high-status traits reflecting dominance (e.g., dominant, demanding) in the United States, Turkey, India, and Ghana—that is, in the relatively less gender-equal nations. Yet, no trait was proscribed for women in the relatively more gender-equal nations of Switzerland and Sweden. The status alignment of women's prescriptions and proscriptions did not relate to nations’ achieved gender equality. We discuss how the alignment of men's gender rules with status beliefs represents a hidden barrier to achieving full gender equality.