Neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships: scale development and novel barrier to collective action for gender equality

Abstract

Neoliberalism emphasizes individual solutions over collective action when seeking to resolve social problems. We argue that it plays a role in romantic relationships, encouraging women to mitigate relationship problems through personal effort, while ignoring structural gender inequality that puts women at a disadvantage, thus presenting a barrier for women to engage in collective action for gender equality. This thesis presents six studies (N = 1,808) that aimed to (1) develop and validate a new measure of neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships, (2) examine whether women’s greater endorsement of neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships is related to less collective action and lower support for gender equality, and (3) investigate whether exposing women to neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships undermines their collective action and support for gender equality. In Studies 1–3, we developed and validated the 20-item Neoliberal Beliefs About Relationships Questionnaire (NBARQ) among women. We found that women’s greater endorsement of the NBARQ was associated with significantly lower collective action intentions, lower support for gender equality (Studies 2 and 3), lower probability of choosing to sign a petition against sexism, and lower number of people that they were willing to share the petition with (Study 3). Exploration of underlying mechanisms for these associations revealed that lower feminist identification and lower perceived injustice about gender inequality in parallel significantly mediated the associations between greater endorsement of the NBARQ and lower collective action intentions, as well as lower support for gender equality (Study 3). To further examine causality, we developed and tested manipulations of exposure to neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships in two pilot studies (Studies 4a and 4b). The manipulation in Study 4b was successful, but when used in Study 5, we did not find a significant effect of women’s exposure to neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships on their collective action intentions or support for gender equality. This thesis contributes to the social psychological literature by developing a new measure of neoliberal beliefs about romantic relationships and testing their role as a novel barrier to women’s engagement in collective action for gender equality. It provides guidance for achieving greater gender equality, especially in the private sphere, by demonstrating the limitations of trying to resolve relationship problems rooted in gender inequality through personal effort and highlighting the importance of facilitating collective action to challenge gender inequality.