Damned if she does: The subordinate male target hypothesis and discrimination of social dominant female minority members

Abstract

According to the subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH), racism is based on an ethnicity-by-gender interaction, with a stronger link between experiencing racist discrimination and subordinate or dominant ethnic group status for men compared to women. This study reevaluates the SMTH, originally focused on objective discrimination, by applying it to self-reported active harm as a theoretically derived measure of racist discrimination and by exploring interindividual differences in female ethnic minority members' discriminatory experiences. We proposed that social dominance orientation (SDO) among female ethnic minorities would influence SMTH predictions. We tested this using multiple linear regression analyses among a sample of New Zealand Europeans as the majority in New Zealand and non-Europeans as the minority. As hypothesized, male non-Europeans reported disproportionally more active harm than female non-Europeans. Unexpectedly, not only female but also male, non-Europeans high in SDO reported more active harm than non-Europeans low in SDO. Therefore, applied to self-reported racist experiences, oppression of ethnic minorities is driven by interindividual differences rather than by gender. Together, these findings provide evidence that the SMTH cannot be unreservedly extended to reports of racist discrimination and that other processes may underlie these subjective experiences of discrimination that need to be considered in more detail.