PMC
Discussion
Consistent with our hypotheses, we found that among a sample of undergraduates, a Black female target, regardless of pregnancy status, was perceived as having had sex with more people in the past month, less likely to use birth control regularly during sex, more likely to have children and to have been pregnant some time in the past, more likely to receive some form of public assistance, to have lower education, and to earn less income per year than a White female target. These effects support our hypotheses that there are negative stereotypes about Black women related to sexuality, motherhood, and socioeconomic status that are consistent with the historical images of the jezebel and welfare queen archetypes. However, as expected, a Black target was not perceived more negatively than a White target on other stigmatized items, such as those relating to marital/relationship status, other health behaviors (smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol regularly), or compliance with health care. The Black target was not perceived more negatively in all ways but was negatively judged in ways that reflect the unique, historically-rooted stereotypes that exist of Black women in the United States. When participants were told that the target was pregnant, the Black pregnant target was perceived as less likely to have the father of the child involved in raising the child and more likely to need public assistance to help with their child than the White pregnant target. This result is consistent with our hypotheses regarding the unique, historically-rooted stereotypes about Black American women related to single motherhood and public assistance and related to the welfare queen archetype. There were no differences by race of target in perceptions of whether she would make a good mother or of the target’s health behaviors during pregnancy (smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol). These results extend prior research, build upon intersectionality theory, and provide evidence that people not only hold unique stereotypes about Black women—both pregnant and in general—that are related to sexuality and motherhood, but that these stereotypes are applied when making judgments about a Black female target.
A pregnant target, regardless of race, was perceived as being more likely to be married and in a serious relationship, to have had sex with more people in her life, not to use birth control or condoms regularly during sex, and for it to be a good idea for her to be a mother. A pregnant target overall was also perceived as less likely to be employed full-time and having less education as well as less likely to drink alcohol regularly. These findings suggest that young pregnant women are also evaluated based on distinct perceptions, such as being more likely to be married or in a relationship, to engage in unprotected sexual behaviors, and to have lower socioeconomic status. This offers support for our suggestion that being pregnant is itself a type of identity or status that elicits distinct perceptions by others.
Furthermore, although the overall test of the interaction between race and pregnancy status of target was not significant, there were some interactions between race and pregnancy status of target for specific items: whether she had been pregnant before, whether it was a good idea for her to be a mother now, and whether she would follow the doctor’s instructions. When no information about pregnancy status was given, there were no differences based on race of target for perceptions of whether she had been pregnant before or whether she would follow her doctor’s instructions. However, when participants were told that the target was pregnant, the Black target was perceived as more likely to have been pregnant before and less likely to follow the doctor’s instructions than the White target. Although we should interpret these findings with caution due to non-significance of the omnibus test, they support the idea that pregnancy is an identity or status that interacts with race to elicit unique stereotypes. A Black target tended to be viewed more negatively on these particular items only when she was pregnant, suggesting that pregnancy interacts with race to create a unique vulnerability to negative stereotypes for Black women. The main effects of target race on items about a pregnant target also reinforce the idea that pregnancy makes a key contribution to stereotypes about Black women, which is consistent with the historically rooted mammy, jezebel, and welfare queen archetypes.
Strengths, Limitations, and Future Directions
The current investigation provides evidence that unique stereotypes about Black women related to sexuality and motherhood influence people’s judgments of Black women in comparison to White women. Further, pregnancy is an important part of these stereotypes. Our findings corroborate and extend past research and support claims about the importance of intersectionality as a framework for understanding societal stereotypes and other experiences of stigmatization of Black women, in addition to other groups. Some scholars have recently been concerned about the “erasure” of Black women and the “flattening” or “depoliticizing” of intersectionality in some work by disconnecting it from its roots in Black women’s experiences of marginalization, activism, and struggles against oppression (e.g., see Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Bilge, 2013). To avoid these pitfalls, we drew on the interdisciplinary work of Black feminist scholar-activists who have focused on the historical and contemporary oppression of Black women to inform the stereotypes we studied. Moreover, we suggest that current study findings not only be considered a documentation of existing stereotypes of Black women related to sexuality and motherhood, but along with other past and current interdisciplinary research, be considered a call to action. Our findings suggest that stereotypical images of Black women that are historically rooted in the systemic oppression of Black women in the United States continue to affect people’s perceptions of and judgments about Black women; research demonstrates such judgments can have a range of adverse consequences (see Rosenthal & Overstreet, 2016, for a review). This work supports the continuing need to work toward eliminating stereotypical media images of Black women and to replace them with more diverse, positive, complex, and dynamic images that reflect the reality of Black women’s lives (e.g., see Mastro, 2015). Our study also supports the continuing need to increase awareness of the influence that stereotypes have on perceptions of Black women and to help people learn how to work toward reducing that influence and respond to Black women in more socially just ways.
Our manipulation of pregnancy status was merely a one-sentence description. Future work might examine whether stronger effects are found with pregnancy status manipulated by visual cues, such as having images of women with and without a visibly pregnant belly. This could potentially reveal stronger effects because visual cues of pregnancy may elicit stereotypes in people’s real-life interactions with pregnant women. Indeed, some of our past work has found that day-to-day experiences with discrimination that young pregnant women of color face, change over the course of pregnancy and postpartum, at times when visual cues of pregnancy (e.g., growing belly) and motherhood (e.g., infant in stroller) may be more or less prominent (Rosenthal et al., 2015).
Future work also might compare perceptions of Black and White women who are either pregnant or not to perceptions of Black and White men who are either expecting to become a parent or not, to study the role that the intersections of race and gender play in stereotyping. Given that we (Rosenthal & Lobel, 2011) have noted that some experiences of discrimination and stereotypes of Latina women are similar, intertwined, or parallel with those of Black women (e.g., Davis, 1981; Ghavami & Peplau, 2013), it would be valuable to expand this investigation to a Latina target that is pregnant or not as well as to targets of other racial/ethnic backgrounds. Also, given the importance of motherhood in stereotypes about Black women, future work may want to examine motherhood as an identity or status that intersects with other identities, such as race, to affect perceptions of women.
Effect sizes were generally small in this study. However, even these small differences in perceptions may be meaningful for women’s well-being through several mechanisms, including stereotype internalization, stereotype threat, and stereotyping leading to discrimination (Rosenthal & Overstreet, 2016). It is not known how perceptions based on race and pregnancy status affect the actual treatment of women. This remains an important issue that should be explored in future research. In both quantitative and qualitative studies, researchers might explore Black women’s awareness of stereotypes related to sexuality and motherhood, and how they feel those stereotypes affect how they are treated in various contexts. Some (e.g., Bowleg, 2008) have suggested that intersectional issues are best studied with qualitative methods, which can give Black women (and other groups of people) the ability to express how stereotypes affect them in ways that may not be captured with quantitative measures. The current findings offer a foundation for examining the connections of stereotypes about Black American women related to sexuality and motherhood to their sexual and reproductive health outcomes through multiple mechanisms; future research is needed to explore those connections. Experimental studies might examine whether the same stereotypes are found among health-care providers and other professionals who interact with women in institutional settings, and whether stereotypes have an influence on services Black women receive. It would be particularly valuable to examine whether perceptions of women affect decision-making and treatment by health-care providers.
The study sample was comprised of undergraduates from a public university in the Northeastern United States, who were on average about 20 years old, close in age but younger than the target Jasmine’s age (25). Given the characteristics of the study sample, it is possible that the results do not accurately estimate the extent of stereotyping that exists in other individuals, and the generalizability of findings should be tested in other samples. Furthermore, the largest racial/ethnic groups represented in the sample were White/European Americans and Asian Americans, with other groups each comprising less than 10% of the sample. Although we found that controlling for race of participant—using a dichotomous variable that compared all White participants to all participants of color—did not change the pattern of results nor moderate any of the effects, our ability to discern the impact of participant race/ethnicity was constrained. Also, controlling for socioeconomic status did not alter nor moderate results, but our self-report measure of socioeconomic status used categories whose interpretation by participants cannot be verified, and some categories were chosen only by a few participants, with the majority identifying as middle class. Thus, our ability to discern the impact of participants’ socioeconomic status was also constrained. Furthermore, because less than 7% of participants identified themselves as Black/African American, the current study was not able to address potential stereotype internalization and its implications, which is an important area for future research. Future research should attempt to replicate study findings in more diverse samples and using more sophisticated assessments of socioeconomic status.
We created and tested single items to assess participants’ stereotypes of Black women. Future work may benefit from using composite measures to assess these stereotypes. Although a strength of the current study is that we studied the application of stereotypes to perceptions or judgments about Black women, exactly how this translates to real-life perceptions, judgments, and treatment of Black women remains unclear. In this tightly controlled experimental context in which participants were asked to make assumptions about a target woman, participants may have been drawing on their understanding of social and economic realities (e.g., Black women being paid less than White women). However, there is evidence that stereotypes can affect judgments and interactions with others both consciously and unconsciously, regardless of the source of those stereotypes (Kunda & Spencer, 2003), with adverse consequences for members of stereotyped groups (e.g., Rosenthal & Overstreet, 2016; Shavers et al., 2012; Steele, 1997).
Possible Implications for Black Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health
As mentioned, the current investigation provides evidence that unique stereotypes about Black women related to sexuality and motherhood influence people’s judgments of Black women in comparison to White women. More work is needed to explore the potential consequences of stereotypes for Black women’s sexual and reproductive health. It is important to explore the effects of stereotypes on health outcomes. There is evidence that stereotypes can be harmful to the well-being of members of stereotyped groups through at least three mechanisms: (1) stereotype internalization, (2) stereotype threat, and (3) stereotyping leading to discrimination (Rosenthal & Overstreet, 2016). Stereotype internalization is when someone endorses stereotypes about their own group; it has been associated with various indicators of poorer well-being for numerous groups (e.g., Davison, Schmalz, Young, & Birch, 2008; Gupta, Szymanski, & Leong, 2011). For example, a recent study found that in a sample of adult Black women, greater internalization of sexual stereotypes of Black Americans, even when based on items that were framed “positively” (e.g., “Black people have a unique quality of sexuality that most White people don’t have”), was associated with more risky sexual attitudes and behavior (Duvall et al., 2013).
Stereotype threat is when someone is worried or anxious about the possibility of confirming or being judged according to stereotypes about their group; it has been found to have a variety of adverse consequences, affecting well-being, performance in the stereotyped domain (e.g., Steele, 1997; Steele & Aronson, 1995), and health behaviors (e.g., Seacat & Mickelson, 2009). For example, a recent study found that stereotype threat, based on health-related stereotypes about Black Americans, was associated with delays in seeking medical care among a sample of Black American adults (Jones et al., 2013). We have also proposed that stereotype threat related to unique stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality and motherhood could lead Black women to experience greater distress throughout their lives and specifically during pregnancy, when some of these stereotypes may be especially salient (Rosenthal & Lobel, 2011). Ample research supports that distress increases risk for adverse birth outcomes, including preterm birth and low birth weight (see Lobel & Dunkel-Schetter, 2016, for a review).
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