The Intertwined Victimhood Narrative and the Challenge to Chinese Men’s Gender Role Legitimacy

Gender inequality is often framed in terms of women’s disadvantage, whereas men’s gender-role constraints are overlooked or discussed in opposition to gender equality. We introduce the Intertwined Victimhood Narrative (IVN), which frames men’s and women’s constraints as interconnected consequences of a shared gender-role system. Two experiments recruited Chinese men through Credamo and randomly assigned them to narrative conditions. Study 1 (N = 200) compared the IVN with a Women-Centric Victimhood Narrative (WCVN) to test whether it would increase men’s recognition of constraints affecting themselves and weaken acceptance of existing gender roles. The IVN increased perceived discrimination against men without reducing perceived discrimination against women, and reduced general gender-role legitimacy. Study 2 (N = 270) further tested whether the IVN would reduce prescriptive gender stereotypes concerning both men and women. Men exposed to the IVN endorsed these stereotypes less strongly overall than those in the WCVN and control conditions, and none of the interactions involving the narrative condition reached significance. The WCVN did not differ from the control condition. These findings suggest that interconnected framing may broaden men’s stake in questioning restrictive gender arrangements and that the consequences of discussing male victimhood depend on its framing.