Emotional evaluations of pictures of female and male soccer players

Soccer is one of the sports activities, where stereotypes against women are still quite common. Also, participation is lower for women in a male-stereotyped sport. One possible explanation might be different attitudes toward female and male athletes in a male-stereotyped sport. It is the main goal of this study to investigate if male soccer players are rated more positively compared to female soccer players. 176 participants (100 cisgender women and 76 cisgender men) completed an explicit and implicit affective rating task and a self-compassion questionnaire. The results showed an own-gender bias in the explicit rating task. In the implicit affective rating task, female soccer players were evaluated more positively than male soccer players, independent of the own gender. Besides, self-compassion was related to the affective evaluations. Explicit and implicit affective ratings did not correlate. According to the implicit and explicit ratings found in this study, we suggest that it is unlikely that implicit affective evaluations are the underlying mechanism of stereotypes in soccer. However, we did not examine the relation of implicit evaluations to stereotypes in sports performance. Therefore, further studies should be conducted to investigate those effects, as well as the impact of other influencing variables on stereotypes against women and female participation in a gender-stereotyped sports activity.