“I don’t care” or “It’s their fault”: System justification and the lack of empathy as complementary obstacles to dealing with the modern sexism

In this paper, we analyzed college students’ perceptions of their experiences with sexism through the frameworks of the benevolent sexism theory and the theory of system justification. These theories describe the complexity of sexism and explain obstacles of dealing with it in the modern Western world. We qualitatively analyzed students’ responses to an open-ended question about sexism on their campuses. While many informants did describe sexism...