Women are actually judged much more leniently than men for the exact same moral failings, despite a global consensus that the opposite is true.
Experimental data from religious and secular groups show a massive gap between what we believe about gender bias and how we actually behave. Most people swear that society is harder on women who break the rules. The results show that men are consistently punished more severely for the same ethical breaches. This belief wedge suggests that our intuition about social fairness is fundamentally broken. We are walking around with a mental map of discrimination that does not match the actual reality of our judgments.
Evidence from a global religious gathering and non-religious settings
SSRN · 6707438
We provide the first causal field evidence on gender discrimination in moral judgments, a domain where informal social sanctions shape incentives and behavior. In two preregistered survey experiments, we asked 1,800 Catholic pilgrims during World Youth Day in Lisbon and 967 citygoers in Lisbon to morally evaluate norm violating vignettes. We randomly varied whether the norm violator was described with a female or male identity and considered violations related to honesty, sexual behavior, and pa