Evaluation of ambivalent sexism in Colombia and validation of the ASI and AMI brief scales

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Evaluation of ambivalent sexism in Colombia and validation of the ASI and AMI brief scales Lizeth Cristina Martı́nez-Baquero☯, Pablo Vallejo-Medina ID☯* School of Psychology, Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz, Bogotá, Colombia ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Martı́nez-Baquero LC, Vallejo-Medina P (2024) Evaluation of ambivalent sexism in Colombia and validation of the ASI and AMI brief scales. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0297981. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297981 Abstract Sexism has implications for people’s physical and mental health. Thus, understanding sexism and its prevalence is key to understanding the phenomenon. In the current study, 717 Colombian men and women completed the brief scales of Ambivalent Sexism toward women and men and the Gender Identity Scale. The assessment was conducted using a web-based method. Both scales, as expected, were two-dimensional. Reliability ranged from .83 to .88. Moderate and high correlations were observed with the Gender Identity Scale. Men showed higher levels of hostile and benevolent sexism toward women and benevolent sexism toward men. It was also found that the higher the level of education, the lower the rates of sexism toward men and women. The brief scales were valid and reliable for measuring hostile and benevolent sexism in Colombia. Editor: Rosemary Frey, University of Auckland, NEW ZEALAND Received: May 28, 2022 Accepted: January 15, 2024 Published: February 29, 2024 Peer Review History: PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process; therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. The editorial history of this article is available here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297981 Copyright: © 2024 Martı́nez-Baquero, VallejoMedina. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The data are held and will be held in a public repository in this link: https://github.com/pableres/papersexism and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7467165 Introduction Every day, there are, on average, 137 femicides worldwide [1]. Latin America is one of the most violent places for women, with 4,640 femicides in 2019 [2]. While 630 femicides were observed in 2020 in Colombia alone [3], 106 more were reported by February 2021 [4]. Femicide is perhaps the gravest form of discrimination suffered by women. The global gender gap calculated in 2019 was 31.4% and showed the differences between men and women in education, health, work, and politics. It will take 99.5 or 135,6 years to equalize the living conditions of men and women. The COVID-19 pandemic also exacerbated the labor gaps between men and women in most Latin American countries [5]. Only 50% of women of working age are employed, as opposed to 75% of men of working age. Women earn 77% of men’s wages. Only 50% of those with university degrees gain access to executive positions [6]. Women spend approximately two-thirds of their free time on domestic activities, whereas men spend only one-third of their free time [7]. The global picture shows a higher number of girls out of school; approximately 16 million will never go to school [8]. Women are better qualified than men at the professional level, although they work and earn less than men [6]. Women tend to choose careers related to caregiving as an extension of the social role assigned to this work. In many cases, women abandon their studies because of childbirth, domestic and caregiving responsibilities, and education inaccessibility due to being prohibited by their families [8,9]. PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297981 February 29, 2024 1 / 17 PLOS ONE Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: he authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Brief Sexism Scales in Colombia Worldwide, around 2.5 billion women and girls suffer the consequences of discriminatory laws and gaps in legal protection. Most states lack legal mechanisms to prevent, protect, and redress women victims of violence and ensure gender equity [10]. The ascription of traditional gender roles in society has implications for men, especially regarding to health, by validating alcohol consumption and violent and risky sexual behaviors as an expression of virility and strength that should characterize men. Men have a shorter life expectancy: 4.4 years less than women. Their Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) burden is three times more than that of women due to work activities involving their exposure to risk factors [11,12]. Worldwide, more men drink and drink in more significant. By 2016, 2.3 million men died from drinking, and 237 million had alcohol use disorders, five times more likely than women to suffer from them [12] Risky sexual behavior is more prevalent among young and adolescent men because they are pressured to have multiple partners due to result of the dominant man stereotype [13]. Gender ideology comprises the beliefs men and women hold about the roles and behaviors that both sexes should maintain concerning paid work, family responsibilities, and other interactions [14]. Gender ideology affects family processes and is directly related to childcare, the division of domestic activities, conflicts, relationship quality, violence against women, work, and economic gains [15]. Two positions are observed in gender ideology: the traditional and the egalitarian. First, the man is considered an authority figure with economic and social power, whereas the woman is considered secondary and is vested with care and reproduction tasks. Second, the equality of roles that men and women can assume [16]. Sexism is closely related to gender inequality and traditional gender ideologies. It is a set of individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and organizational, institutional, and cultural practices that express negative evaluations of individuals based on their gender, causing and maintaining inequality between women and men [17]. In addition, prejudices like sexism and racism share common aspects: discrimination denial, the antagonism between the demands made by groups, and the resentment provoked toward the support policies that some obtain in favor of their rights [18]. Glick and Fiske’s [16] theory of ambivalent sexism considers sexism a prejudice marked by deep ambivalence and multidimensionality, denoting a mixture of hostile and benevolent attitudes. Hostile Sexism (HS) is traditional sexism oriented toward the perception of inferiority of the other sex. Benevolent Sexism (BS) presents sexist attitudes with a positive affective (...truncated)