How far is from Ms. Psychologist to Mr. Psychologist?

Abstract

Abstract 

For many years there has been a lot of discussion around the feminine forms of job titles, both in politics and in other areas of social life. Both sides of the barricade exchange arguments for and against their use. On the other hand, not enough research on this subject has been carried out in Poland so far. The aim of the experimental study (N = 140) was to check the influence of the "feminine ending" on the assessment of professional competences of women who title themselves in this way. Two versions of the questionnaire with six candidates were prepared: in one them the feminine job titles were used, while in the other their masculine equivalents. Additionally, in the case of one of the candidates, a fictitious name of the profession was introduced in order to check whether the respondents, when confronted with a foreign name, would devalue the candidate using the feminine ending. The study showed that the competences of the female candidates who used Polish feminine forms of “architect” and “lawyer” in their self-descriptions were assessed lower than those of the women using the masculine equivalents of these two professional titles, and the result was statistically significant. In the remaining cases, no statistically significant differences were found. The moderator verified in the study were sexist views measured with The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory by Peter Glick and Susan Fiske, translated by Małgorzata Mikołajczak and Janina Pietrzak under the name: Scale of Ambivalence towards Women. It was shown that both people with medium and high scores in this questionnaire rated the female candidate significantly lower than those with low scores. In the case of job names without feminine endings the evaluation results were similar, regardless of the level of displayed sexism.  

Keywords: feminine forms of professional titles, women's competences, ambivalent sexism, employment tendencies, gender discrimination