Ricerc@Sapienza

We investigate gender representations applied to a Ministerial political office, the attitudes
towards women in a group of Chinese college students and whether such attitudes are reflected
in the representations of the Ministerial political office. These representations were detected, inter
alia, by the request of three free associations to the stimulus-words Man/Woman Minister. With
the scale of Glick and Fiske (1996), administered after the free associations, we verified the twofactor
structure of Ambivalent Sexism (ASI, Hostile / Benevolent Sexism) highlighted in a crosscultural
comparison in 19 countries (Glick et al., 2000). The respondents were 181 students at
Hangzhou Dianzi University and Zhejiang University (51.4% women; average age about 22
years) contacted in 2016. The results confirmed the two-factor structure of the ASI scale, which
explains 31.8% of the total variance, with a first factor of Hostile Sexism (HS) and a second factor
of Benevolent Sexism (BS). Textual data revealed a general vocabulary differentiated for
Man/Woman Minister. The findings were commented by referring to the literature on stereotypes
and gender bias, to the specificity of Chinese cultural context, to the comparison with similar
Italian investigations, and also to the reference to political representations.