Religiosity, Honor Beliefs and Ambivalent Sexism Among Muslim University Students.

Abstract

Pakistan needs to focus more on gender empowerment by overcoming hurdles such as sexism, inequality, prejudice etc. In order to achieve gender parity and egalitarian values in society there is a need to eliminate sexism, bias cultural values or constructs that are influencing it. Therefore, it is needed to understand how Ambivalent Sexism, Honor Beliefs and Religiosity are related with each other and this research provides us with an understanding of how these constructs influence each other in society. Thus, for this purpose data from sample of 300 participants from different universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad was collected. The data consists of 142 males and 158 females. The correlational research design was used to explore the relationship between Ambivalent Sexism, Honor Beliefs and Religiosity which was the main objective of this research. The instruments used to measure Ambivalent Sexism, Honor Beliefs and Religiosity were Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (Glick &Fiske, 1996), Honor Endorsement Index (Vandello et al., 2009) and Centrality of Religiosity (Huber, 2012) respectively. The results indicate that both Religiosity and Honor Beliefs have significant positive correlation with Ambivalent Sexism and these two variables are also significantly predicting Ambivalent Sexism. On the basis of results, it can be concluded that one of the ways to reduce sexism in society is by increasing egalitarian values and teachings of Quran that highlight the important of equality in society and prohibit gender discrimination.