Mansplaining isn’t just for men, new study suggests

One of the most striking recent public examples of 'mansplaining' is this video of professional golfer Georgia Ball having her swing critiqued by a male amateur at a driving range. Many women will be familiar with receiving this kind of unsolicited, prescriptive 'this is what you're doing wrong and this is how you should do it' type advice from men — and often men who are not qualified to judge.

According to new research in Psychological Science, however, mansplaining and its and its negative emotional fallout might not be a male-only domain. Such critiques from other women can have a negative effect on how women feel about themselves — though, according to this study, not as badly as when they come from men.

Erik Santoro at Columbia Business School and Hazel Rose Markus at Stanford University ran a series of studies on US-based women to explore the impacts of 'mansplaining'-type unresponsive advice. Here, they compared the effects of unsolicited commands with 'responsive' advice, which is characterised by understanding and validating the other person's needs and interests.

After a pilot study revealed that women perceive that men give unresponsive advice more often than women, the team went on to ask 431 women to have text-based conversations with a man about stress around Covid-19. (This study took place several months after the start of the pandemic.)

The researchers asked the men to either give three pieces of advice (such as: 'You're probably feeling stressed because of the news and social media. You should take breaks from watching or listening to news stories') or to ask three questions instead (such as: 'I'm interested in knowing more about what's going on. What's stress you out most these days?')

Santoro and Markus found that the women who'd texted with a man who gave unresponsive advice felt less respected, less powerful, less trusting, less listened to — and even that the size of their self, compared to their conversational partner, had been diminished.

The researchers then explored whether the gender of the advice-giver matters. In this study, 1,835 women read vignettes in which either a man or a woman gave a co-worker of equal standing unresponsive advice around getting promoted or instead asked supportive questions about this. The participants reported on how they thought they would feel if they were the person in the vignette.

The results showed that it didn't matter whether the unresponsive advice came from a man or a woman — either way, it made the participants imagine that they'd feel less respected, that they were of a lower status, and that they had a smaller sense of power, as well as self. There was one difference when the advice came from a woman rather than a man, however: the participants were less likely to feel that stereotypes about their own gender had probably influenced the interaction.

These results were then replicated in a further study, in which the team compared unresponsive vs responsive advice (rather than questions), again in the context of a theoretical work situation. (In this study, a male or female co-worker either said 'You really ought to have a discussion with your supervisor', for example, or 'It might help to have a discussion with your supervisor.')

It's worth noting that the studies were all of US-based women who were mostly White, college-educated, and politically liberal. It would be useful to run similar studies on men, those of other races, as well as people who don't identify as either male or female, the team notes.

This research does suggest, though, that mansplaining really is damaging. And, if the results of the pilot study reflect the real world, men are more guilty than women of giving this type of damaging advice. As well as affecting the individual women on the receiving end, there may be potentially important societal implications, the team adds: "Unresponsive advice, and mansplaining more broadly, may perpetuate a hierarchy in which men are accorded more status than women.'

Read the paper in full:
Santoro, E., & Markus, H. R. (2024). Is Mansplaining Gendered? The Effects of Unsolicited, Generic, and Prescriptive Advice on U.S. Women. Psychological Science, 35(12), 1395-1415. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241268630

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