Relation of ethnicity and age to women's responses to personal experiencesof sexist discrimination in the United States

The authors explored self-reported experiences of interpersonal sexist disc rimination and responses to such incidents in a heterogeneous sample of 262 women in the northeastern United States. They divided the sample into 2 ca tegories for age (< 30 years, > 30 years) and for ethnicity (women of color , European American women). Across categories of age and ethnicity, the par ticipants (a) commonly experienced sexist discrimination and (b) viewed men as the primary perpetrators of the discrimination. Although the women's re ports of sexist experiences were similar for the most part, the authors fou nd significant age differences in the frequency of categories of sexist eve nts and in specific events, as well as in some general responses to such in cidents. Ethnicity, operationalized here as women of color and European Ame rican women, did not have a significant influence.