Do racial and ethnic stereotypes depend on the sex of target group members? Evidence from a survey-based experiment

Several social scientific perspectives suggest that racial and ethnic stereotypes vary by the sex of minority group members. However, prior research has not used survey data to test the hypothesis that the public holds strong gendered racial/ethnic stereotypes. We exploit a between-subjects experiment in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to investigate the extent to which respondents' beliefs about seven attributes of four racial/ethnic target groups depend on the sex of target group members. Consistent with the "contingent" perspective of intersectionality theory, we find that effects of target group sex depend upon the extent to which particular racial/ethnic stereotypes have been gendered in American culture. However, we also find that effects of target group sex are consistently much smaller than those of race/ethnicity. We conclude by discussing implications for survey research on stereotypes across multiple status dimensions.