"Can women be perceived as good as men in sport? Only when doping!": when social dominance motives shape judgements of women's doping suspicions in threat situations

In this work, we examine whether differences in social dominance orientation (SDO) may lead to the creation of a 'climate of suspicion' regarding women's sporting excellence as well as to negative perceptions of sportswomen in general. We suggest that SDO works as a basic ideological belief system aiming to preserve the hegemony of men in a sport. We employed a scenario methodology in which participants (N = 80) read one of the two alleged sports news website excerpts in which women's performances threatened (or not) the gendered status quo of sport. It was expected that individuals high in SDO, who are particularly resistant to change, would question women's sportsmanship more strongly than those who value equality (i.e. those relatively low in SDO). Moreover, we anticipated that high-SDO participants would use more negative traits to describe sportswomen when assigned to a threatening condition. Coherent with the above, our results suggest that the field of sport still implicates a significant amount of gender inequality that marginalize women performances.