Dr Rosemary Lobban

Recent events such as the US presidential campaign have polarised public opinion, particularly in terms of support for ‘populist’ political figures, e.g. Donald Trump, and the seemingly non-egalitarian ideologies that they promote. One might anticipate that disempowered social groups, such as women or sexual minorities, would reject ‘rightwing populism’, as it rarely appears to advocate their interests or facilitate their empowerment. Yet the existence of movements like ‘Gays for Trump’ and ‘#WomenWhoVoteTrump’ indicate more complex patterns of support. How might we understand this from gender and sexualities perspectives? This paper presents the proceedings of a round table discussion. Our contributors, members of a crossinstitutional social psychological Gender and Sexualities Research Group, each presented a brief five-minute interpretation of the phenomenon. They did so from gender and/or sexualities perspectives, drawing upon different social psychological theory. A chaired debate followed. Key themes from the round table are identified which are potentially helpful in understanding the phenomenon. The broader implications of these themes for practice and theory are considered in terms of the concept of ‘safe identities’.

Explicit measures of gender attitudes are vulnerable to egalitarian norms and thus may not predict the effectiveness of gendered advertising consistently. We report three quantitative studies which manipulate egalitarian norms (Study 1) and employ hierarchical regression analyses to test the predictive power of explicit and implicit gender attitudes in explaining the effectiveness of gendered advertisements. Study 1 (n=47) showed uniquely that only under conditions where egalitarian norms were inactive did the (subtle) explicit Benevolence toward Men attitude predict the effectiveness of non-traditional Househusband advert types (i.e. the higher the benevolence the greater effectiveness of these adverts). Study 2 (n=60) showed that under the same conditions a new paper Implicit Association Test (IAT) predicted their effectiveness better than explicit attitudes (the higher the relative implicit preference for non-traditional vs. traditional male type the greater effectiveness of the Househusband advert). Study 3 (n=72) replicated these findings for non-traditional female advert types (the higher the relative implicit preference for non-traditional vs. traditional female type the greater effectiveness of the Businesswoman advert). Thus paper IATs had greater utility than explicit gender attitude measures in predicting the effectiveness of gendered ads.