Studies reveal a pervasive pro-women/anti-men bias across various demographics, particularly evident in implicit evaluations. The “women are wonderful effect" describes a global positive perception of women compared to men. Notably, women exhibit stronger in-group bias favoring their own gender. Additionally, a willingness to accept instrumental harm to men over women is observed, especially pronounced among women.

Peer-reviewed Research

Across five studies (N = 5,204), we investigated implicit evaluations of targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, the largest and most consistent evaluative bias was pro-women/anti-men bias… An integrative data analysis highlighted a number of moderating factors, but a stable pro-women/anti-men and pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class bias across demographic groups. (pg.22)

Connor, P., Weeks, M., Glaser, J., Chen, S., & Keltner, D. (2023). Intersectional implicit bias: Evidence for asymmetrically compounding bias and the predominance of target gender. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 124(1), 22–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000314

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[T]here is a bias in favor of women that Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic (1994) have dubbed the women are wonderful effect. Their work shows that the global category “women” is viewed more positively than the global category “men” on traditional evaluative measures. This finding has been widely replicated and is supported by earlier research on attitudes toward the sexes (Eagly, Mladinic, & Otto, 1991), although, interestingly, the pattern went unnoticed for many years. This pattern also emerges in measures of implicit attitudes toward women and men. Laurie Rudman and Stephanie Goodwin (2004) found that positive words, such as good, happy, and paradise, are associated more often with women than with men, a preference that was particularly strong for women participants. (pg.466-467)

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Whitley, B. E., Jr, & Kite, M. E. (2009). The psychology of prejudice and discrimination (2nd ed.). Wadsworth Publishing.

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Although men, historically and cross-culturally, are the dominant sex, they possess remarkably weaker in-group bias than do women. In four experiments, we found this sex difference persisted using both implicit and explicit measures, despite using a gender attitude IAT that was unconfounded with gender stereotypes… Thus, we can claim with confidence that even when men are responding automatically, their in-group bias is surprisingly frail and that women’s in-group bias is particularly strong at the implicit level (i.e., stronger than men’s by a factor of 4.5). (pg.506)

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Rudman, L. A., & Goodwin, S. A. (2004). Gender Differences in Automatic In-Group Bias: Why Do Women Like Women More Than Men Like Men? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(4), 494–509. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.4.494

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Goodwin, also a member of Purdue's Women Studies Program, teamed with Laurie Rudman, professor of psychology at Rutgers University, to conduct four studies measuring implicit attitudes of 379 adults. Their results show that women prefer women, and men, on average, don't have a preference toward either gender. Although men, on average, did not show in-group favoritism, individual men's responses varied widely, with some men showing a preference for women and others showing a preference for men… The results showed that women showed in-group favoritism four times greater than men. Those figures are based on an average of separate studies that involved research groups of varying sizes.

Patterson-Neubert, A. (2004, December 13). New research: Women like women more than men like men. Purdue.edu. https://www.purdue.edu/uns/html4ever/2004/041213.Goodwin.gender.html

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Even in these traditionally female contexts, participants still more readily accepted IH to men than women. Findings indicate people (especially women) are less willing to accept instrumental harm befalling women (vs. men). (pg.2433)

Although we predict a greater tolerance for instrumental harm borne by men than by women, not all individuals will espouse such an asymmetry to equal degrees. A substantial body of evidence finds women exhibit stronger in-group biases favoring their own gender than do men (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004), suggesting greater acceptance of IH to men than women will be especially pronounced among women. Across countries, women express stronger hostility toward men and lower hostility toward women (Glick et al., 2004), suggesting if anyone should exhibit the hypothesized gender bias in instrumental harm acceptance, it should be women. Supporting this prediction, laboratory experiments find women redistribute payments to favor low-earning female (but not male) workers, whereas men showed no such gender bias (Cappelen et al., 2019). In the courtroom, women filing workplace discrimination claims were more likely to win compensation when their case was adjudicated by a female judge (Knepper, 2018). These patterns might be explained by a stronger bias in moral typecasting among women, whereby women more easily recognize other women as victims and men as perpetrators of harm (Reynolds et al., 2020). (pg.2434-2435)

The current investigation sought to examine whether people were more willing to endorse interventions when IH was borne by men than women. Our first two studies supported this premise. Importantly, however, our results showed that this asymmetry was driven primarily by women, but not men, being more likely to accept IH to men than to women across a variety of contexts (pg.2441)

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Graso, M., Reynolds, T., & Aquino, K. (2023). Worth the risk? Greater acceptance of instrumental harm befalling men than women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 52(6), 2433–2445. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-023-02571-0