From Sexualized Media Consumption to Salary Negotiation: The Relation Between Chronic Self-Objectification Processes and Women’s Negotiation Intentions

Despite the advancement in women’s conditions in the past fifty years, women are still the targets of forms of oppression that span from sexual objectification to gender economic inequality, which, among other factors, is linked to challenges that women may face with wage negotiation. Bridging these two research areas, in the present correlational study (N = 552), we took the female target perspective and investigated whether everyday sexualized media consumption may be indirectly linked with Italian women’s negotiation intentions in a working scenario (i.e. salary request, negotiation probability, salary raise negotiation). We hypothesized that this association would be mediated by internalization of mainstream beauty ideals, chronic self-objectification, and subsequent lower self-attribution of the fundamental social dimensions of competence, agency, and morality. Path analyses supported the indirect path model on all the negotiation behaviors via self-attribution of competence; a significant indirect path via self-attribution of morality was also found on women’s negotiation probability. Implications for gender economic inequality as well as possible interventions are discussed.