Benevolent Sexism and Cross-Gender Helping: A Subtle Reinforcement of Existing Gender Relations

Romantic gestures that men make toward the women they love or whose heart they wish to win often involve providing help—whether it is opening and holding the door, paying for her drink, lifting her heavy suitcase, or completing a complicated task. In these everyday interactions, helping relations between men and women are rarely explicitly framed as intergroup helping, but rather as interpersonal helping. Hence, the consequences of this behaviour for the intergroup level remain concealed. In this chapter, in line with the feminist motto that “the personal is political” (Hanisch, 1970), we argue that when such mundane interpersonal interactions between men and women are aggregated, they can profoundly shape gender relations. Thus, cross-gender helping interactions can perpetuate and consolidate the role of men as competent and agentic, and the role of women as passive, incompetent, and dependent (Glick & Fiske, 2001). Our theorising integrates the logic of the Intergroup Helping as Status Relations model (IHSR, Halabi & Nadler, 2017; Nadler, 2002) on the one hand, and research on benevolent sexism—the ideology that men should offer protection and affection to women in return for compliance with traditional gender roles (Glick & Fiske, 1996) —on the other. Specifically, we reasoned that because benevolent sexism maintains gender inequalities through paternalistic cooperation rather than through overt hostility and conflict, helping relations may play a crucial role in the process of translating this ideology into actual behavioural mechanisms that perpetuate traditional gender roles. In the following sections, we first present theorising and research on the IHSR, which puts forward the distinction between autonomy-oriented and dependencyoriented forms of intergroup helping, suggesting that the latter might serve as a