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Racially Charged: The Impact of Ambivalent Sexism on Black and White Women Arrested for Prostitution

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Abstract

Many scholars investigating sexism distinguish between two related, but distinct, forms of sexism aimed at women: hostile sexism and benevolent sexism (Glick & Fiske, 1996). These sexist beliefs can seem contradictory, with hostile sexism (HS) reflecting more contempt for women and benevolent sexism (BS) offering protection and care to women, but both serve to maintain the gender status hierarchy. However, these concepts may have been created based on the white feminine ideal and may not apply to women of color. For example, expectations about female sexual purity may be different across race and may lead to differential treatment of women who violate purity norms. In the current research, participants (N = 410) read a news article about a black or white woman arrested for prostitution, and answered questions about convicting, punishing, and helping the woman. Participants high in HS and high in BS were more likely to convict and punish the sex worker than those low in HS and BS, but HS and BS did not interact with race when predicting conviction and punishment. For helping those high in HS were less likely to recommend immediate interventions and those high in BS were more likely to recommend dependency-oriented interventions, but none of the two-way interactions with sexism and race was significant. It is possible that sex work is such a strong violation of the female purity norm that punishment of women who violate this norm does not vary based on the characteristics of the woman but more intersectional research on race and sexism is needed.

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Data Availability

All data, materials, and software applications support published claims and comply with field standards. All data and study materials are available from the corresponding author upon request. All data have also been uploaded to the Open Science Framework data repository.

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All data coding are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Notes

  1. 1. Although we did not make specific predictions about how participant gender might interact with the key IVs of HS/BS and sex worker race, we conducted exploratory analyses of the three-way interactions predicting the main DVs. We conducted multinomial logistic regressions to predict conviction and punishment, and neither of the three-way interactions between the BS x gender x SW race or HS x gender x SW race was significant. We also conducted stepwise linear regressions predicting the three helping interventions and none of the three-way interactions was significant (β’s < .07, t’s < 1.2).

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Funding

This research was supported in part by an Aurora University Research Grant.

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Correspondence to Renae Franiuk.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Appendices

Appendix

This appendix contains the full-text article that participants read in the study, accompanying a picture of a black or white woman. This article was taken from the Times Enterprise (Dozier, 2019) and the URL can be found in the References section.

Georgia Woman Arrested in Prostitution Sting

Mar 14, 2019

THOMASVILLE—A little before 9 a.m. Monday, an undercover Thomasville police officer approached a woman at the intersection of Stevens Street and Forsythe Lane and asked if she was all right.

The woman responded that she was all right but needed $2. When the officer said he had $2, the woman upped the amount to $10, asked for permission to get in the officer’s vehicle, propositioned a sex act for $10 and told the officer she knew a place they could go.

As the officer drove west on Cairo Road and was near the 319 bypass, another officer conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle. Other officers arrived, and the woman was taken into custody following the prostitution sting.

The sting resulted from complaints and concerns from residents of the Carroll Hill area, said Maj. Wade Glover, TPD public information officer.

"If we get complaints from people in specific neighborhoods, we find out where the illegal activity is occurring and develop police initiatives,” Glover said. Undercover operations such as the one on Carroll Hill are ongoing and based on resident complaints. “We set up sting operations, look for perpetrators and make charges,” Glover said. “Our overall mission is to reduce crime and improve quality of life in that area."

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Eldabli, A., Franiuk, R. & Coleman, J.M. Racially Charged: The Impact of Ambivalent Sexism on Black and White Women Arrested for Prostitution. Race Soc Probl 14, 101–113 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-021-09341-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-021-09341-4

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