A cocktail-party cartoon launched the individual-difference measure of sexism

Evidence

Gender prejudice research began serendipitously, with a cocktail party and a New Yorker cartoon (Helmreich, 1999). Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich met at a party, and both were struck by a cartoon in which a man said to a woman during a dinner date, “You are really stupid. I like that in a woman.” Helmreich had recently found that competent men were liked more than incompetent men, and the two wondered whether the effect would generalize to women. The result was their seminal study, “Who Likes Competent Women?” (Spence & Helmreich, 1972a). To test their hypothesis that only gender egalitarians would like competent women, they designed the first individual difference measure of sexism, the (misnamed) Attitudes Toward Women Scale (Spence & Helmreich, 1972b), which assesses attitudes toward the rights and roles of women. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 746

Categorization

• CANDY: A single New Yorker cartoon (‘You are really stupid. I like that in a woman’) birthed the first individual-difference sexism scale — a fun origin anecdote.
• SEED: The comic-triggered research origin is a nice essay hook for ‘how absurd origins seed rigorous science.’