Comrades in the Struggle? Feminist Women Prefer Male Allies Who Offer Autonomy- not Dependency-Oriented Help

Abstract

Feminist women view feminist men who take a backseat and offer partial help (i.e., autonomy-oriented support) as better allies than those who attempt to solve the problem themselves and who impose their will on the movement (i.e., dependency-oriented support). We support this idea in two experiments (ns = 96; 270) conducted in the United States. Further, we show that this preference is limited to women who are most motivated to challenge gender inequality, that is, those who strongly identify with feminists (Study 2). Our findings are important because although men are more willing to challenge gender inequality if they identify with feminists (Wiley et al. 2013), not all allied support is wanted or even helpful (Droogendyk et al. 2016), and some feminist men run the risk of reinforcing the very gender hierarchy that they seek to dismantle. Our studies shift the focus in research on allied activism from whether men will support women when they challenge gender inequality to what kind of support women actually want. Implications for psychological research on intergroup relations and feminist scholarship are considered.

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