“Women are wonderful” effect. Ruolo dell’uguaglianza sociale di genere e dei comportamenti stereotipati

Gender (in)equality is well documented in the literature. In this paper, we aim to analyse some discriminatory aspects of gender perception, including the impact of social and behavioural factors, as well as cultural and societal aspects, throught a broad critical review of recent literature. Furthermore we synthetically present two studies that demonstrate the presence of the discriminatory effect called “Woman-are-Wonderful” (WAW, Eagly e Mladinic, 1994). This phenomenon, which suggests that women are evaluated more positively than men, is a kind of benevolent paternalistic sexism and reflects the bias that women are associated with nurturing characteristics. In our first study we asked participants to evaluate a set of pictures with smiling and non-smiling women and men. The results shown that smiling women are perceived as more competent and have a higher probability to be hired than smiling men, whereas non-smiling women are judged less sociable and moral, and have a lower probability to be hired than men. In the second study, conducted in 44 countries, we found that the WAW effect is stronger in less egalitarian cultures. In more egalitarian cultures, even if women are less discriminated in comparison with other societies, men are judged better than in societies with higher levels of gender inequality. We close with a discussion of the social and cultural implications of our findings.