Achieving Equality or Persisting Inequality: Effects of Framing of Equality on Attitudes Toward Women and Gender Equality Through Identity Threat and Cognitive Unfreezing

Previous evidence suggests that interventions that raise awareness of gender inequality might have the potential to challenge and undo well-anchored biases but, at the same time, might be threatening and provoke reactance against them. The effects of such interventions might also have a differential impact on women and men and vary depending on their level of neosexism and feminist identification. Extending previous research, two pre-registered studies (N = 1,895) were conducted to explore the differential effects of interventions that raise awareness of gender (in)equality with two frames (i.e., gender equality achievement vs. gender inequality persistence) on women's and men's attitudes toward women and gender equality. We also examined whether participants' gender ideology moderates these effects via different psychological mechanisms (identity threat and cognitive unfreezing). Results indicated that for women, the gender inequality persistence framing is more effective (increases cognitive unfreezing) but potentially riskier (enhances identity threat) than the gender equality achievement framing. For men, the gender equality achievement framing seems especially effective as it reduced identity threat, although such effect is contingent on their gender ideology (feminist identification or/and neosexism). These findings have implications for the discourse of practitioners, politicians, and activists who might capitalize on the power of combining gender equality with gender inequality frames to improve attitudes toward women and gender equality depending on the specific goals, the context, and the target of the interventions.