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Sex Roles (2012) 66:468478 DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-0116-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Intergenerational Transmission of Benevolent Sexism from Mothers to Daughters and its Relation to Daughters Academic Performance and Goals
Pilar Montas & Soledad de Lemus & Gerd Bohner &
Jess L. Megas & Miguel Moya & Rocio Garcia-Retamero
Published online: 13 January 2012# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract A questionnaire study addressed the intergenerational transmission of benevolent sexist beliefs (BS) from mothers to adolescent daughters and influences of BS on daughters traditional goals, academic goals (i.e., getting an academic degree), and academic performance. In addition, the role of mothers educational level and job status as predictors of their BS was explored. One hundred sixty-four pairs of female adolescents and their mothers from Granada (Spain) completed questionnaires independently. Hypotheses were tested in a path model. Results suggest that mothers BS is negatively predicted by their education but not their job status. Mothers BS predicted daughters BS, which in turn negatively predicted daughtersgoal to get an academic degree and positively predicted daughters traditional goals. Daughters academic performance was positively predicted by their goal to get an academic degree and negatively predicted by mothers BS. Results are discussed in terms of the socializing influence of mothers sexist ideology on their daughters and its implications for
the maintenance of traditional roles that perpetuate gender inequalities.
Keywords Benevolent sexism . Goals . Intergenerational transmission . Academic performance . Adolescence
Introduction
Adolescence is a key stage in the development of sexist attitudes and expectations of appropriate behaviors for each gender. This has been shown for adolescents from Spain (de Lemus et al. 2010) and the United States (for reviews, see Glick and Hilt 2000; Maccoby 1998). For women, it can be particularly harmful to endorse benevolent sexist beliefs, according to which they should obtain mens affection and protection in exchange for maintaining traditional gender roles (Glick and Fiske 1996); this is because the positive affective tone of such beliefs often conceals their discriminatory nature, as was shown by Barreto and Ellemers (2005; and Ellemers & Barreto, 2009), for Dutch college students. The literature suggests that mothers attitudes are a central factor influencing how their daughters learn traditional versus more liberal gender roles, as shown for children, teenagers, and parents from the U.S. (Eccles...