Confronting Sexism as Persuasion: Effects of a Confrontation's Recipient, Source, Message, and Context

We applied the message-learning theory of persuasion to examine perceptions of leaders who confront sexism. Participants (N = 283) read vignettes that varied the confrontation message (i.e., directness), source (i.e., confronter gender), and context (i.e., public vs. private). As hypothesized, female (vs. male) participants evaluated confronters more positively and female (vs. male) leaders were evaluated less favorably when they confronted publically. Additionally, participants perceived greater sexism for public (vs. private) confrontation contexts and were more surprised when the confrontation source was a male (vs. female) leader. Implications for confronting and persuasion theories and applications for policymakers are discussed.