Does Long-Term Exposure to Sexist Video Games Create Sexist Attitudes

S. Paul Stermer and Melissa Burkley conducted a study to see if male gamers long term exposure to sexist video games creates sexist attitudes toward women.  They wanted to see if male gamers who play games with sexist attributes over a long period of time, could contribute in changing the gamers attitude. When they say long term exposure they mean regular or repeated contact with the game over a long period of time, like months or years. The two types of sexism that they looked at are hostile and benevolent. Hostile sexism is when men have antipathy towards women and don’t want them to have the same power as themselves. Benevolent sexism is when men want to keep women in their “assigned” gender roles and want to protect their delicacy. This type of sexism isn't physically harsh towards women, but it does keep women in inferior roles and portrays them as too weak to have as much power as men.

The prediction that they made is that benevolent sexism would be more present than hostile sexism. The reason they predicted this is because of the “damsel in distress” idea present in many video games.  They also predicted that benevolent behavior and attitudes would be more present in male gamers than female gamers.

The participants for this experiment were 175 (61 male and 114 female) students from a university in the Mid-West. The age range was 18-27. The participants were given a questionnaire and asked what were the three games they played the most and rank each one on how much sexist content there was (1 being the least and 7 being the highest). The three scores were averaged to comprise a score for each person. They were also asked questions about women in both a hostile and benevolent way. An example was “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men”. They ranked each statement on how much they agreed on it from 1 (least) to 7 (most).

The most popular games between both sexes included The Sims, Mario Kart, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and other various sport games. According to the results, it was determined that men play games with more sexist content than women. There was no difference in benevolent sexism between men and women though men, who ranked their most played game as sexist, had a higher level of benevolent sexism. This could mean that the quality of the game is more important and has a bigger influence than the quantity of time spent playing the game. There were also higher levels of hostile sexism present in men than women.