One of the most widely-used tools to measure sexism is the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), by social psychologists Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske. The original 1996 paper (available here) has been cited more than 2,800 times (Google Scholar). It’s been influential for its idea that sexism has two components: hostile sexism (overtly negative attitudes towards women) and benevolent sexism (subjectively positive attitudes towards women that still contribute to gender inequality). The actual test (take it for yourself here) has been used for educational resources, population research, etc.

While I appreciate that Glick and Fiske (being academics) have a more nuanced view of sexism (and power) than most activists, I still want to point out some problems.

(Length: 800 words.)

Number 1: They count unfavorable views of feminists as sexism against women. Two of the 22 questions ask not about women, but about feminists. Disagreeing with either of the following two statements is counted as hostile sexism against women:

Feminists are not seeking for women to have more power than men. Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.

But an unfavorable view of feminists is not the same thing as an unfavorable view of women. The groups “feminists” and “women” overlap but they’re not interchangeable (according to one poll, 32% of women identify with feminism and 45% don’t, while 19% of men do and 61% don’t—YouGov poll, U.S.A, 2016).

We almost universally accept that having an unfavorable view of a country’s elected representatives doesn’t itself mean prejudice or dislike towards the voters or citizens of that country. And feminists aren’t even the elected representatives of women—they’re an advocacy group/movement for women. And there’s no cosmic rule ensuring that their ideas will be correct and their demands will be reasonable, now or in the future.

The website Understanding Prejudice provides a defense that applies here, saying that sexism scales have specific items that don’t seem sexist but when all of the items are taken together they are “statistically related to other measures of sexism and gender inequality”. But a sexism scale should actually measure sexism, not other factors that might correlate with sexism. Let’s speculate that there’s a correlation between poverty and sexism (poorer countries being more sexist). Should a sexism scale ask “do you live in a poor country?” and mark “yes” as sexism? Certainly not!

Number 2: To their credit the authors have a counterpart for men, the AMI: Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 1999). But they drop the term “sexism” and take a more neutral and less condemning tone towards it.

Negative beliefs about men are mostly described with neutral and dispassionate terms like “beliefs”, while negative beliefs about women are given the special status of being condemned as sexism, a label which presupposes that the belief is unacceptable and bigoted. What’s worse, even positive beliefs about women are seen as more worthy of being called sexism (against women) than negative beliefs about men are seen as worthy of being called sexism (against men):

We do not label the “positive” side of this ambivalence “pro-women” attitudes for, as we have detailed above, we believe that these attitudes are themselves sexist.

In other words, saying that men are better than women in some regard is sexism against women but saying that women are better than men in some regard isn’t sexism against men—actually, it’s still (benevolent) sexism against women!

Number 3: They seem basically unconcerned with whether any of the beliefs they’re talking about (as sexism or positive/negative beliefs) are actually true or not.

If you heard someone say that most men are physically stronger than most women, you probably wouldn’t call them sexist. They are expressing a negative or unfavorable view of women’s abilities—like saying that most men are smarter than most women—but I think most people have the intuition that something isn’t sexist if it’s true. What would it even mean to say that the truth is sexist? That we shouldn’t believe the truth?

A few of the beliefs targeted in the ASI and AMI are true, or at least arguable. One of them from the AMI is that “[m]en are more willing to take risks than women”. This is actually backed by quite a bit of evidence (e.g. 1999 meta-analysis, 2002 study, 2012 study). (Also, this is classified as a positive view of men but I don’t know why. The proper amount of risk tolerance depends on the circumstances, and more is not always better.)

Another one of the beliefs—“Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for ‘equality'” (from the ASI)—is quite clearly true. Favorable hiring policies for women (e.g. affirmative action, employment equity, and boardroom quotas) really are advocated (by many women and men) as methods to achieve equality, and have been enacted as law.

It’s not clear whether they intended for all of these beliefs (that for women they describe as sexism and for men they describe as negative/positive beliefs) to be untrue, or whether they are just looking at beliefs that people have, regardless of truth.