Article The Allure of Sexism: Psychological Entitlement Fosters Women’s Endorsement of Benevolent Sexism Over Time

Benevolent sexism functions to uphold gender inequality by expressing caring and reverent attitudes exclusively toward women. Do these subjective benefits lure women to endorse benevolent sexism? We tested this by examining whether women’s psychological entitlement was associated with concurrent levels of benevolent sexism and longitudinal changes in benevolent sexism over 1 year in a national panel sample (N 4421 New Zealanders). As predicted, latent variable interaction analyses indicated that women higher in psychological entitlement more strongly endorsed benevolent sexism and increasingly endorsed benevolent sexism over the year. Men’s psychological entitlement was more weakly associated with benevolent sexism con-currently and unrelated to changes in benevolent sexism across time. These findings provide the first evidence that the benefits of benevolent sexism are central to women’s adoption and endorsement of sexist attitudes toward their own gender—attitudes which contribute more broadly to the maintenance of gender inequality. Keywords narcissism, entitlement, benevolent sexism, ambivalent sexism, latent variable interactions. Women’s agreement with sexist attitudes toward their own gender is central to the legitimization of men’s advantaged access to power, status, and resources (Glick & Fiske, 1996