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Counter-Stereotypical Career-Related Media Content and Adolescents’ Professional Sexism: A Longitudinal Study of Woman Boss Television Series and Social Media Posts

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Abstract

Woman boss series and woman boss posts on social media that portray women in stereotypically male professions have attracted scholarly attention. The positive effects of this content on adolescents over time are unclear. This study helped fill this gap by examining the within-person reciprocal relations between exposure to woman boss series and posts and adolescents’ beliefs about the male vs. female division of professional tasks according to traditional gender stereotypes (which was labeled as professional sexism). We examined the mediating role of the perceived utility of such content and the moderating roles of hypergender identity and knowing women in counter-stereotypical professions offline. A total of 1,286 late adolescents (Mage = 18.33, SD = 0.64) participated in a three-wave longitudinal study with a four-month time interval. The findings indicated positive but inconsistent within-person associations between professional sexism and the perceived utility of woman boss series. The results supported the moderating role of knowing women in atypical professions; that is, the perceived utility of woman boss posts on social media in Wave 2 related to professional sexism in Wave 3. The direction of the association changed when considering the extent to which adolescents knew women in atypical professions. Implications for how parents, teachers, and academic school counselors may talk with adolescents about women who are portrayed in atypical occupations in TV series and on social media are discussed.

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All the materials, supplementary materials, syntaxes and data can be found in the Open Science framework at https://osf.io/93jpy/

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Sofie Vranken, Lara Schreurs, Chelly Maes, Femke Konings, Brent Swinnen, Lien Klewais, and Robyn Janssens for their help during the data collection. We would also like to thank the school principals and school staff who agreed to participate and who arranged the practicalities for the data collection during school hours.

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) under Grant 11G0220N.

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Correspondence to Ilse Vranken.

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Research involving Human Participants and/or Animals

The research involved human participants (i.e., late adolescents).

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All participants (i.e., late adolescents) provided active consent to participate in the study. The parents of participants provided passive parental consent. Note that this study was ethically approved by the institutional review board of KU Leuven.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Vranken, I., Devos, S. & Vandenbosch, L. Counter-Stereotypical Career-Related Media Content and Adolescents’ Professional Sexism: A Longitudinal Study of Woman Boss Television Series and Social Media Posts. Sex Roles 89, 288–310 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-023-01391-9

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