Research: Arkansas most sexist state, New Hampshire least

Arkansas is the most sexist state in the nation while New Hampshire is the least, according to an index of sexist attitudes developed by economists at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and National University Singapore.

Kerwin Kofi Charles and his colleagues wanted to know how the prevalence of sexist beliefs in the places where women grew up and in the places they worked as adults affected outcomes such as wages, workforce participation, and age at marriage and childbirth. To do that, they gathered multiple years of data from the General Social Survey, a biennial nationally representative survey measuring Americans’ beliefs on a wide variety of subjects.

To measure the prevalence of sexist beliefs, the researchers drew on eight questions on attitudes toward gender issues that have been part of the survey since the 1970s. Among other things, the questions measure agreement with statements such as “Women should take care of running their home and leave running the country up to men” and “A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relation- ship with her children as a mother who does not work.”

They also ask respon- dents if they would ever vote for a female president and whether men are “bet- ter suited emotionally” for politics.

The researchers combined responses to these questions and summarized them at the state level, creating a nationwide index of sexist attitudes (they previously used a similar method to measure the prevalence of racist beliefs). Mapping those numbers yields a compre- hensive picture of the geog- raphy of American sexism.

“Sexism is highest in the Southeast and least extreme in New England and the West,” Charles and his colleagues write. “The figure shows that there is substantial variation in mean sexism across states within each geographic region of the country.”

It’s tempting to explain away these differences as a function of say, political beliefs: Is this just a measure of conservative attitudes toward gender and family?

A closer look at the map reveals this is not the case. Some of the least sexist states, such as Wyoming and Alaska, also tend to be the most reliably Republican in presidential elections. On the other hand, some Dem- ocratic strongholds, such as Illinois and New York, end up in the middle of the pack. That suggests these ques- tions are measuring differ- ences in beliefs not typically reflected in the ubiquitous red/blue framework domi- nating much of the national discourse today.

According to the research by Charles and his colleagues, these state-level distinctions can have significant impacts on women’s lives.

“Sexism in a woman’s state of birth and in her current state of residence both lower her wages and likelihood of labor force participation, and lead her to marry and bear her first child sooner,” they find. Even more striking, the prevalence of sexism in a woman’s birth state seems to affect her later earnings and outcomes even if she moves to a place with less sexism.

“Sexism where she was born, which we call background sexism, affects a woman’s outcomes even after she is an adult living in another market through the influence of norms that she internalized during her formative years,” the study finds.

One piece of good news is that the General Social Survey data shows sexist attitudes are declining across the board. Nationwide, the share of Americans who say men are “better suited” for politics than women has fallen from 48 percent in 1977 to 18 percent in 2016, for instance.