Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Türkoğlu Demirel B., Hergül (Team Leader) E. B.(Yürütücü), Yeşilırmak E.
Yükseköğretim Kurumları Destekli Proje, 2022 - 2023
Women's ideal partners and their choice of partners may perpetuate gender inequality. For example, studies refer to the role of ambivalent sexism in romantic relationships with the endorsement of separate power-based hostile sexism (HS) and romanticized benevolent sexism (BS) ideologies (Lee, Fiske, Glick & Chen, 2010). High-sexist women maintain traditional gender roles and accept the man's high-status role as resource provider; and while in such a relationship, she may lose motivation for her access to economic resources (Sibley & Overall, 2011). On the other hand, men may perceive a threat and get discomfort
from gendered situations when others question their protective roles, decision-making authority, breadwinner status, or tough appearance (Türkoğlu, 2013). In such situations, women may foresee this and tend to behave in ways that do not threaten men's masculinity. For example, a woman who earns more than her male partner may anticipate that it would be a threat to her partner’s manhood. In such situations, women's adherence to norms of manhood may lead them to act in a non-threatening way (e.g., Jordan et al., 2022). Thus, women’s anticipation of manhood threatening situations and behaving in a gender-role congruent way may maintain the already existing gender inequalities.
In addition to the research on perceptions of only women or only men, women's predictions of the ideal partner's perceived threat to manhood are also important in understanding the way they maintain these norms, because not only men maintain masculinity norms, but also women accept and maintain these norms (Lease, Çiftçi, Demir & Boyraz, 2009). Also, women's partner choices, their perceptions of their ideal partners, and sexist attitudes should be expressed more clearly, which play an important role in preventing gender inequality and different types of violence fueled by these attitudes. Previous studies have examined the connection of partner choice with sexism and gender roles (Backus & Mahalik, 2011). Also, another research by Sibley and Overall (2011) proved that women with high benevolent sexism attach importance to status in their partner choices. However, although studies showed that how people perceive manhood has an important role in how they behave in their relationships (e.g., Moss-Racusin & Good, 2015; Stephan & Stephan, 2000; Weaver & Vescio, 2015), there is no research focusing on women’s perception related to manhood threat, especially on their romantic partner ideals.
In this study, we hypothesize that the women’s anticipated threat related to their potential partner’s manhood and their endorsement of ambivalent sexism will predict their ideal partner choices. Based on the previous research (Sibley & Overall, 2011), we predict that women with high benevolent sexism (BS) will prefer status resources in their partner choices; and women with high hostile sexism (HS) women will not prefer warmth-trustworthiness in their partner choices. We also expect that women's anticipation related to threats to their partner's manhood (e.g., protective roles, decision-making authorities, breadwinner status or tough appearance, subordination to women) will predict women's ideal partner criteria.