Dangerous Ideas

There are a lot of sexist jokes that go around, either verbally or digitally. Women in male-dominated fields, like computing, experience this regularly. When we complain, we’re often told that it’s “just a joke” or to “have a sense of humor about it”, or “it’s bad, but it’s not a really big deal”. Now there’s research that shows that sexist jokes encourage more tangible discrimination:

“We found that men with a high level of sexism were less likely to donate to the women’s organization after reading sexist jokes, but not after reading either sexist statements or neutral jokes,” Ford said.

In the second experiment, men were shown video clips of sexist or non-sexist comedy skits and were then asked to participate in a project designed to determine how funding cuts should be allocated amongst select student organizations.

“We found that, upon exposure to sexist humor, men higher in sexism discriminated against women by allocating larger funding cuts to a women’s organization than they did to other organizations,” Ford said.

“We also found that, in the presence of sexist humor, participants believed the other participants would approve of the funding cuts to women’s organizations,” he said. “We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way.”

I like that the lead researcher, Thomas Ford, is a man. It’s good to have allies! Sometimes men ask how they can help women in computing, and being good allies is a great start. Not just by doing studies like this, but also by speaking out when someone says something stupid.