Book Description

Gender is highly influential in social and organizational life. In recent years, research has shown that race often interacts with gender to produce different outcomes for women of different races. However, extant work has largely focused solely on the racial group membership of the target woman. In my dissertation, I expand upon prior work by shifting the focus to include both the perceiver and the target, and by extension, the psychological relationship between the two. Drawing from a social constructionist perspective on gender, I argue that racial groups represent the social communities within which gender is constructed, conferred, and enacted, and explore this proposition in a few different ways. In Chapter 1, I explore the basic psychology of this understanding of gender, demonstrating that people primarily associate the construct of womanhood with racial in-group members, more so than racial out-group members. I find that this effect generalizes across samples of White (Study 1) and Asian (Study 2) perceivers, suggesting that, broadly speaking, when people think of women, they primarily think of racial in-group women. In Chapters 2 and 3, I explore an important downstream consequence of the tendency to ascribe womanhood more to racial in-group members than racial out-group members--gender-norm enforcement. In Chapter 2, I examine penalties that women suffer in response to gender-norm violation (i.e., backlash). Across five studies, I find that White (Studies 1, 3, and 4), Black (Study 2), and Asian (Study 5) perceivers all penalize racial in-group women who violate gender norms more than racial out-group women for the same behavior. In Chapter 3, I turn to the flip side of gender-norm enforcement--rewards that women may receive for conforming to gender norms. In two studies, I find that White men extend benevolence and aid to gender-norm conforming women primarily when these women are White, rather than Black or Asian. Across nine studies, I find evidence that people construct, confer, and enforce gender within their respective racial groups. I establish that people hold a basic, cognitive link between racial in-group members and the construct of womanhood. I further demonstrate that this way of understanding gender is linked to important outcomes. Both penalties for gender-norm violation and rewards for gender-norm adherence are primarily meted out towards racial in-group women, rather than racial out-group women. Broadly speaking, my dissertation suggests that people may understand gender primarily in the context of their racial in-groups.