Someone was asking what others thought about the Women are Wonderful effet, and this feminist claimed that while women as an abstract category were liked, individual women were not.
Her "evidence" for this claim was a chapter, "Women are Wonderful, but Most Are Disliked" in a feminist book, Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era Modern Misogyny: Anti-Feminism in a Post-Feminist Era (from the name of the book, you can tell what you're in for).
Abstract:
"Chapter 5 explores the research on attitudes toward women. The category “women” elicits more warm feelings than the category “men.” This phenomenon has been described by social psychologists as the women-are-wonderful effect. Many individual women embrace and find protection in the warm feelings people tend to have for women. However, on further examination, we find that most women do not benefit from the women-are-wonderful effect because the phenomenon is relevant to the most traditional women who adhere to strict gender roles (e.g., homemakers). Most women today do not conform to traditional gender roles—they are working women, women leaders, athletes, feminists, soldiers, lesbians—and people’s views of nontraditional women are negative. Chapter 5 explores the experimental research on nontraditional women, exposing and explaining the modern misogyny of attitudes toward contemporary women."
Given my experience with shredding feminist claims, I knew that there was a very high chance that the claims in the abstract were not borne out by reality or were otherwise misleading, so I decided to dig into it. And of course, I was right.
The contents of the book chapter do not match what the summary claims, so it's the usual feminist bait and switch. The abstract claims that "most" women are disliked - but most of the chapter talks about competent women being disliked in work contexts, which is a different claim (unless one thinks most/all women are competent and that they are [almost] always in work contexts).
The first few studies are of poor quality, because in the ambivalent sexism inventory, so-called "hostile sexism" actually measures things like anti-feminism and attitudes about empirical facts about the world rather than sexism against women (i.e. what the term "hostile sexism" suggests); I have written extensively about how the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory is nonsense. The chapter also talks about reactions towards people with benevolent/hostile sexism (not attitudes towards women per se).
Furthermore, a lot of the logic doesn't even make sense on its own terms. The claim is that women are viewed positively as a group but not individually. But the ambivalent sexism inventory doesn't even measure attitudes towards individual women.
A lot of this research cited in this chapter is also in the realm of "competence", which would be in the professional sphere. It would be a category error to generalise this to claim that women in general are disliked when they violate norms. And even if that claim were reasonable, one would have to prove that most women violate gender norms most of the time.
Anyway, the studies claiming to show that competent women are looked down on are of poor quality. Becker et al 2011 (Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t: Consequences of accepting versus confronting patronizing help for the female target and male actor) looks at attitudes towards a woman who accepted or rejected a man's benevolently sexist offer of help. There is a very obvious omission here - they didn't look at attitudes towards a man who accepted or rejected a woman's patronising offer of help. Or a woman who accepted or rejected a woman's patronising offer of help. Or a man who accepted or rejected a man's patronising offer of help. To look at only one permutation out of at least four possible permutations and drawing conclusions about sexism is... premature, to say the least. For all we know, the effect is not driven by sex at all, or a man in a similar situation would be judged even more harshly than a woman.
Fiske 2012 (Managing ambivalent prejudices: The smart-but-cold, and the warm-butdumb sterotypes) doesn't present its own research, but refers to other papers, which makes tracking down the source for the claim annoying. I was unable to locate a source for what the author claimed it showed.
Heilman 2004 (Penalties for success: Reactions to women who succeed at male gender-typed tasks.) had the same issue as Becker et al 2011 - it just looked at how women were liked when successful "in an arena that is distinctly male in character". For all we know (and this is very likely given other research I refer to below), men who are successful in female areas are even more disliked than women who are successful in male areas. So this would reinforce the original claim of the women are wonderful effect - people like women more than they like men.
We have again the same problem with Gervais & Hillard 2011 (A role congruity perspective on prejudice toward Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin), about Sarah Palin vs Hillary Clinton; it doesn't look at male politicians as controls. And given a sample size of 2, Palin might have been liked - but not because she was incompetent, and Clinton might have been disliked - but not because she was competent. There is an interesting study which switched Trump and Clinton which found that the woman imitating Trump was liked and the man aping Clinton was disliked (i.e. Clinton wasn't disliked because she was a woman, and Trump wasn't liked because he was a man). This actually went against the researchers' thesis about sexism.
We also have studies (not mentioned in the chapter) that contradict the assumption that women who violate gender norms are disliked. For example, women face no discrimination for traditionally male jobs, but men face discrimination for traditionally female jobs. Also, the effect of dominance on women's likeability is small (d = -0.19) whereas the effect size for attitudes towards men and women as reported in Eagly 1991 (Are Women Evaluated More Favorably Than Men?) is large at 0.54. In other words, it seems a dominant woman would probably still be liked more than a man.
The sports section of the paper is even worse (both in logic and in relevance to the claim), and ignores the fact that women's sports is much less popular than men's sports, and misunderstands the differences in female and male bodies. Looking at women try men's gymnastics is a good way to refute the author's daydreams about "What would it mean for women’s gymnasts to be fully grown adult women with muscles and power?".
Typical of feminist nonsense, we also get a lot of irrelevant bits about stuff like sexual assault, transwomen (who are not women), and complaints about violence against lesbians (without mentioning who commits this - it's actually other lesbians, but that's inconvenient for feminism's agenda of blaming men).
So in summary, like most feminist research, this is shoddy and doesn't prove what it claims.
