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John Doe's Tripartite Model

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Despite the fact discrimination against women has made substantial progress over the past 20 years, there is still a long way to go in order to change perceptions (Bible & Hill, 2007). In this day and age there are laws in place in Australia to remove gender discrimination -treating someone differently based on whether they are male or female (Equal Opportunity Commission, 2010). It is unlawful to discriminate against people due to their gender in employment, education, providing goods and services, accommodation, clubs and associations, granting qualifications, advertising and selling land (Equal Opportunity Commission, 2010). Take John Doe for example; he was born into an average socioeconomic class with a family who upheld very traditional …show more content…

It is made up of three components, affective, behavioural and cognitive. The affective component is referring to a person’s feelings and emotions towards something, the behavioural is mentioning the corresponding behaviour and finally the cognitive aspect is the beliefs and knowledge about the attitude (Spencer et al., 2007). John’s attitude is not unusual as it is held by a large amount of men. This particularly sexist attitude can be conceptualised quite easily into the tripartite model (Refer to figure 1) (Spencer et al., 2007). A recent study in 2015 has shown that men feel threatened seeing a woman in a superior role (Netchaeva et al., 2015). This fits into the affective component of the model under prejudice with feelings and emotions; when women enter a predominately male workplace it often makes people like John feel heavily threatened and uncomfortable (Steenstrup, 2011). As mentioned earlier it has been found that men in traditional marriages disfavour women in the workplace and are more likely to make decisions that prevent the advancement of qualified women (Schwartz, 2014). This is supportive of the behavioural component meaning that the actions of John are very discriminative against women, simply because they are female. Finally when looking at the third part of the model, cognitive, it is generally believed that women should fit the “stay-at-home worker” image who takes care of the house and family. This has created the typical “housewife” stereotype that many men such as John believe to exist (Clifton et

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