Attitudes to Gender Inequality in South Africa: Evidence from Implicit and Explicit Attitudes

We use the Harvard Gender-Career Implicit Association Test (IAT)) and a selfreport questionnaire on 402 respondents in South Africa to explore the factors that contribute to implicit and explicit gender attitudes, moreso the discrepancy between implicit and explicit attitudes. Our initial findings indicate that implicit gender attitudes do not necessarily correlate with explicit gender attitudes in the sample, confirming the implicit-explicit discrepancy (IED) theory. On further investigation, we observe that women appear to hold implicit traditional gender role ideology compared to men, even though women are more likely than men to explicitly self-report for gender equality. We also find that some parental factors, such as being raised by a mother only, are associated with the IED. Overall, these results suggest that in order to effectively tackle gender inequality, a wider policy approach is required, one that can address some of these factors that contribute to gender unequal outcomes.