Are you racist or sexist?

With two candidates poised to make history it's inevitable that discussions of race and gender will abound. Here is a piece in The New York Times by Nicholas Kristof that presents information that seems possible to me. But you be the judge:

Our Racist, Sexist Selves

... The unconscious is playing a political role this year, for the evidence is overwhelming that most Americans have unconscious biases both against blacks and against women in executive roles.

At first glance, it may seem that Barack Obama would face a stronger impediment than Hillary Clinton. Experiments have shown that the brain categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex. And evolutionary psychologists believe we’re hard-wired to be suspicious of people outside our own group, to save our ancestors from blithely greeting enemy tribes of cave men. In contrast, there’s no hard-wired hostility toward women, though men may have a hard-wired desire to control and impregnate them.

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.” Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

In another experiment, researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a player’s jersey color but not necessarily his or her race. But only very rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment. Looking at the challenges that black and female candidates face in overcoming unconscious bias, he added, “Based on the underlying psychology and anthropology, I think it’s more difficult for a woman, though not impossible.”

Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agrees: “In general, gender trumps race. ... Race may be easier to overcome.”

The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of. [...]

Women now hold 55 percent of top jobs at American foundations but are still vastly underrepresented among political and corporate leaders — and one factor may be that those are seen as jobs requiring particular toughness. Our unconscious may feel more of a mismatch when a woman competes to be president or a C.E.O. than when she aims to lead a foundation or a university.

Women face a related challenge: Those viewed as tough and strong are also typically perceived as cold and unfeminine. Many experiments have found that women have trouble being perceived as both nice and competent.

“Clinton runs the risk of being seen as particularly cold, particularly uncaring, because she doesn’t fit the mold,” said Joshua Correll, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. “It probably is something a man doesn’t deal with.” ...

In a previous piece, Kristof looks at misogny vs. sexism.

... I simply assumed that the discrimination that women faced around the world was rooted in misogyny; now I wonder if sexism isn’t the better term. Let me explain the evolution of my thought.

Initially, I focused on misogyny because women in so many places are targeted for particularly brutality. For example, in South Asia, acid attacks are common against women, but almost never against men. Likewise, many different cultures report incidents in which women are picked out and stripped naked or otherwise sexually humiliated, in ways that rarely happen to men. And as best the records tell us, women were executed about twice as often for witchcraft as men. Granted, in conflicts men and boys are invariably killed at far higher rates than women and girls, but that’s functional: it facilitates robbery and reduces the men’s ability to bear arms in a rival militia. In contrast, women are often assaulted in ways that seem less functional and just gratuitously barbarous. The rape-caused fistulas in Congo are one example. So all that is why I tended to reach for misogyny as an explanation.

Then in the reporting for this column, I spoke to evolutionary psychologists who emphasized the distinct origins of racism and misogyny/sexism. Racism seems based in a hard-wired tendency of ancient humans to divide into groups to improve odds of survival, and it was an evolutionary advantage to be able to identify strongly with your own tribe and to fear or kill members of other tribes. That may be why even very small children — even infants — draw racial distinctions or other in-group/out-group distinctions.

In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes. Acquiring and enforcing a harem, so as to improve the odds of one’s own genes being passed on, might involve ruthlessness, enslavement and brutal beatings, but there was no evolutionary incentive for gender hatred as there was for hatred of different tribes. And of course much of the anti-women behavior around the world, from genital cutting to bride burnings to sex trafficking, is typically overseen by women themselves, and it’s easier to see their behavior as opportunism or deeply-embedded sexism than as hatred of fellow women. So that’s why I wonder if sexism, in the sense of discriminatory attitudes toward males and females, isn’t a better way of thinking about the issue than misogyny, in the sense of hatred toward women. [...]

I can’t say I’m fully convinced of the argument I’m making. There are still the acid attacks and similar behavior, which I find hard to explain short of misogyny. And maybe the distinction between sexism and misogyny is artificial. Wife-beating may be rooted in the male desire to control a mate and ensure that she passes on his genes and no one else’s, and such behavior isn’t driven by hatred of women in the way that lynchings were driven by racism or that attacks on gays were driven by homophobia. But for the woman with multiple broken arms, that may seem a meaningless distinction.

Test yourself:

Joshua Correll at University of Chicago has created an on-line test called “the police officer’s dilemma.”

Also try the “implicit attitude tests” on-line at Project Implicit at Harvard. They measure unconscious attitudes on race, age, gender religion and other issues.