No Barriers for Trailblazers? Empowerment Messaging Increases Women’s Burden and Blame for Gender Inequality in the Canadian Armed Forces
Date
2022-08-26
Authors
Desgrosseilliers, Elysia
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Abstract
Gender inequality persists in the workplace, including in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). The CAF is struggling to attain their goal of increasing the representation of women in uniform from 16% to 25%. One factor that may be contributing to their struggle is the cultural response of empowerment messaging to gender inequality. Empowerment messaging coveys that women can succeed in life through personal agency and optimism about the future. However, this seemingly positive messaging has the negative effect of increasing attributions of women’s responsibility for gender inequality while disregarding systemic barriers (i.e., women should overcome sexism because they have personal agency and the individual choice to do so). I contend that the CAF is using empowerment messaging in some of their public messaging, and I propose that the negative effects of empowerment messaging will generalize to the CAF context. In two experiments (total N = 812), exposure to empowerment messaging from a CAF video directly increased the burden placed on women to solve gender inequality in the CAF and indirectly predicted more blame placed on women for causing gender inequality in the CAF. This research suggests that institutional empowerment messaging meant to motivate and inspire women may in fact harm women. The CAF and other institutions struggling with gender inequality should avoid using empowerment messaging in their public communications to prevent harming women, especially with their focus on increasing the number of women in their organizations.
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Keywords
empowerment messaging, gender inequality, military, Canadian Armed Forces