The study was motivated by a long-standing question in social psychology: how do evaluative attitudes toward gender roles connect to the persistence of gender inequality? Attitudes, in the psychological sense, are evaluative judgments that combine cognitive, affective, and behavioral components, and they play a central role in interpersonal relationships. When those attitudes concern gender roles, they can reinforce social norms about what men and women should do, and in doing so help maintain unequal social arrangements. Understanding who holds traditional attitudes, and what beliefs travel alongside them, is therefore considered relevant to understanding how inequality endures.

The theoretical backbone of the research is Ambivalent Sexism Theory, proposed by Peter Glick and Susan Fiske in 1996. The theory distinguishes two complementary forms of sexism. Hostile sexism involves antagonistic, negative evaluations of women who are perceived as challenging men’s power, status, or traditional gender relations, including views of gender relations as competitive and of women as seeking control over men. Benevolent sexism, by contrast, is subjectively positive but paternalistic: it casts women as warm, dependent, and in need of protection and provision from men. Although benevolent sexism sounds flattering, the theory holds that both forms work together to justify and maintain traditional gender arrangements, rewarding women who conform and punishing those who do not.

To measure attitudes toward women’s roles, the researchers used the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, originally developed by Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich in the 1970s, in its 15-item short form. The Brazilian version had been previously validated, with satisfactory internal consistency, and asks respondents to rate statements about the roles women can play in society, such as whether economic and social freedom is worth more to a woman than accepting the role of housewife. After reverse-scoring relevant items, higher scores indicate more egalitarian, profeminist attitudes, while lower scores indicate more traditional views. For sexism, the team used the Brazilian-validated Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, a 22-item measure split into hostile and benevolent subscales.

Study 1 involved 224 participants from the general population, aged 18 to 62, with a mean age of 32.46 years. Most participants were women, 82 percent of the sample, and most identified as heterosexual and middle class, with the largest regional share, 43.75 percent, residing in Brazil’s Northern region. Because men made up only 18 percent of the sample, roughly 40 participants, the researchers conducted a sensitivity power analysis to establish what size of effect the design could reliably detect, and used heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors to make the regression estimates robust.

The results of Study 1 pointed to a gender-specific pattern. Bivariate correlations showed that more egalitarian attitudes were negatively associated with age and with male gender. The key finding, however, emerged from a moderation analysis: the interaction between age and gender was statistically significant. Among men, older age was associated with lower scores on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale, meaning more traditional attitudes, with an unstandardized coefficient of minus 0.03. Among women, age was not significantly associated with attitudes at all. In other words, the age gradient in gender attitudes appeared only in the male portion of the sample, and the overall main effect of age on its own was not statistically significant.

Study 2 extended the investigation to a new sample of 261 participants, aged 18 to 69, with a mean age of 29.14 years, again predominantly women, at 75.8 percent, and drawn mostly from Brazil’s Southeast region. Here the researchers ran a multiple regression model entering age, gender, hostile sexism, and benevolent sexism simultaneously as predictors of attitudes toward women. The overall model was statistically significant, F(4, 256) = 30.07, p < .001. Both hostile sexism, with a standardized coefficient of minus 0.40, and benevolent sexism, with a standardized coefficient of minus 0.22, were significantly associated with less egalitarian attitudes toward women. Hostile sexism showed the stronger association, although the authors caution that the benevolent sexism subscale had lower internal consistency in this sample, so comparisons of magnitude should be interpreted carefully.

A striking feature of the Study 2 results is what disappeared. Once both forms of sexism were included in the model, neither age nor gender remained a significant predictor of attitudes toward women. The authors are careful about how this is interpreted: because the age-by-gender interaction from Study 1 was not tested in Study 2’s model, the findings cannot be taken as evidence that ambivalent sexism attenuated or explained away the age effect observed among men. Instead, the two studies offer complementary evidence, one highlighting a demographic pattern and the other highlighting the centrality of sexist beliefs. The researchers also note conceptual overlap between the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory, since Glick and Fiske themselves used the former to assess the convergent validity of the latter, meaning the observed association links related but distinct constructs.

The authors emphasize that all of these results are associations, not causal or mediational effects. The cross-sectional design precludes any claim that aging causes attitudes to shift, or that sexism produces traditional attitudes over time. The age-related pattern among men, in particular, should not be read as developmental change across the lifespan, since it could equally reflect cohort differences between generations. The researchers also flag measurement limitations: the Brazilian version of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale has not been tested for measurement invariance across gender groups, and the inferential analyses used binary gender coding, excluding participants who selected other gender identities. With only 40 men in Study 1, the gender-specific age association was estimated from a relatively small subgroup, which limits its precision and generalizability.

Even with those caveats, the research offers a coherent picture of how gender-related attitudes vary in the Brazilian context. Consistent with Ambivalent Sexism Theory, both the hostile form that penalizes women who challenge traditional roles and the benevolent form that rewards women who conform were tied to less egalitarian views. The finding that older men reported more traditional attitudes echoes earlier work showing higher sexism among older adults, and aligns with studies documenting gender differences in sexist attitudes from adolescence onward, though the authors stress that evidence from different age groups and designs does not establish developmental continuity. The team suggests that future research should use larger, more gender-balanced samples, longitudinal designs, formal tests of theoretically specified pathways, and evaluations of interventions promoting egalitarian attitudes, work that could ultimately inform public policies aimed at addressing gender-based prejudice and discrimination in Brazil.

Subject of Research: Associations of ambivalent sexism, age, and gender with attitudes toward women's roles among Brazilian adults

Article Title: What do Sexism, Age, and Gender Say About Brazilians’ Attitudes Toward Women’s Roles?

Article References: Nascimento de Lima, D. C., Silva Santos, I. L., Paiva, T. T., Mariano, T. E., & Pimentel, C. E. (2026). What do Sexism, Age, and Gender Say About Brazilians’ Attitudes Toward Women’s Roles?. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00549-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00549-0

Keywords: ambivalent sexism, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, gender roles, attitudes toward women, Brazil, social psychology, age differences, gender differences, Attitudes Toward Women Scale, cross-sectional study, gender inequality