Understanding the resistance to gender equality: backlash effects and system-justifying ideologies – URGEN

Gender inequalities are still persistent in France. For instance, women continue to face a glass ceiling in their workplace, earn 18.6% less than men, and are 4.5 times more likely to interrupt their career for childcare. In social psychology several models endeavor to identify factors that motivate systemic social change. However, they neglect people’s resistance to change, anchored in their motivation to justify social inequalities. The general objective of the present research program is thus to better understand the legitimation processes by which people, even when being members of disadvantaged groups (i.e., women), resist social change towards greater equality, and and the consequences of these processes for social advancement (e.g., in terms of collective action). We ground our theoretical considerations in System Justification Theory (Jost, 2018; Jost & Banaji, 1994) which proposes that people are motivated to consider the system in which they live and its functioning (the norms and rules prevailing in the system) as equitable, legitimate, natural and desirable. In order to imbue the system with legitimacy, people resort to ideologies. URGEN project is organized around three Work Packages (WP), each of which focusing on a specific system-justifying ideology, namely gender stereotypes (WP1), neoliberalism (WP2) and intensive mothering (WP3). WP1 will go beyond previous work on backlash effects (i.e., hostile reactions against counter-stereotypical women) by (1) focusing on gender stereotypes as a function of women’s social class, (2) uncovering backlash effects that target women depending on their social class, and (3) examining how best to counteract these detrimental effects for women’s social advancement. WP2 and WP3 will target neoliberalism and intensive mothering ideologies. We will expand previous research by documenting the psychosocial processes underlying the reliance on these ideologies to maintain gender inequalities. In WP2 neoliberal ideology and its underpinning values and principles (e.g., individualism, personal responsibility, competition, meritocracy, etc.) will be examined with respect to the contextual (French) specificities. We will then investigate their potential harmful impact on feminist identification and on feminist collective action. Finally, in WP3, intensive mothering ideology (Hays, 1996), as disseminated in French “mummy” blogs, will be considered as a means to maintain the unequal division of parental tasks, and to justify the class hierarchy between mothers. By including an ideological level of analysis, somewhat under-mobilized in social psychology relative to other levels (intra-individual, inter-individual and intergroup levels; Doise, 1982), these three WP together will contribute to a better understanding of the barriers to gender equality. The originality of the project also lies in its intersectionality approach and the contextualization of the research. The study of social media (i.e., blogs and Twitter) as a means both to impede and promote change is another innovative contribution to existing research. Furthermore, the project relies on both qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve its objectives.