Benefit-Finding Improves Well-Being among Women Who Have Experienced Gender Discrimination

Prompting women to reflect on the lessons or implications of past experiences of discrimination for their present selves was found to improve subjective well-being while also motivating action for positive change.

• The benefit-finding condition, where participants were asked to write about the implications or lessons of their discriminatory experience, produced positive effects on participants’ self-assessments of five measures of well-being: self-esteem, post-traumatic growth, optimism, hope, and happiness. 
• Women in the benefit-finding condition reported greater willingness to take collective action to confront future sexist experiences than women in either the discrimination control condition (where women were just asked to think of a past sexist experience) or the facts control condition (where women were asked to reflect on facts around gender discrimination), despite no differences among these groups in their perceptions of sexism. 
• Importantly, this intervention to improve the well-being of women who have experienced discrimination was not intended to minimize perceptions of the prevalence of sexism, but instead to provide women with a practical means of improving their well-being and equip them to navigate future societal spaces where they may be vulnerable to intergroup bias.  

Encouraging women to reflect on the lessons of past experiences of sexist discrimination can improve subjective well-being, while also motivating women toward collective action for positive change.

All participants were adult women living in the United States who were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Each participant was paid $1.00 upon completion of the study. 

Study 1a  

Study 1a consisted of 136 participants who were asked to read a passage about sex discrimination, and then told to think about a recent time during which they were discriminated against or treated in a sexist manner.  

Sixty-three participants were randomly assigned to a benefit-finding condition, where they received the following writing prompt: “We are interested in the implications or lessons you see in retrospect for the discrimination event that you described. Write a few sentences about the meaning or the lessons that this experience has had for you today.” Seventy-three participants were randomly assigned to a discrimination-control condition, where they also wrote about their discrimination experience, but were not asked to consider the implications or lessons that they perceived for themselves in the present. After the writing task, all participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure well-being, rating on a 7-point Likert scale how likely they were to agree or disagree with statements relating to the following topics: self-esteem, post-traumatic growth, optimism, hope, and happiness.  

Study 1b  

Study 1b consisted of 92 women, 48 of whom were assigned to a benefit-finding condition and 44 to a discrimination-control condition. Participants received the same instructions as in Study 1a. However, for this study, the authors included a manipulation check that directly asked whether study participants benefited from past experiences of discrimination (this had not been asked in Study 1a). The manipulation check was designed to ensure that the study would address the question of whether benefit-finding improved well-being that the authors were seeking to answer. Participants in the benefit-finding condition completed a survey of 10 questions to measure what benefits they had derived from their discriminatory experience. Participants were also tested on whether writing about the benefits following from a discrimination experience reduced current negative mood compared to only writing about the discrimination experience itself. 

Study 1c 

Study 1c included 181 women, 40 of whom were randomly assigned to a benefit-finding condition, 65 of whom were randomly assigned to a discrimination-control condition, and 76 of whom were randomly assigned to a facts-control condition. Participants received the same instructions as in Studies 1a and 1b. However, for this experiment, the authors included a third condition where participants were not asked to write about a personal discrimination event or to reflect on the implications of such an experience of gender discrimination, but instead were asked to write down facts that they had previously heard about gender discrimination.