Chapter 2: Gender Microaggressions, the Contemporary Form of Gender Bias: A Systematic Literature Review

Blatant forms of sexism have been on a decline within the egalitarian society and are being consistently replaced with a more covert and ambiguous form of prejudice toward women. Gender microaggressions are brief and everyday verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, slights, and snubs that are targeted toward women. They are pernicious and create an environment that normalizes the denigration of women. The authors’ research objectives are to explore the different manifestations of gender microaggressions, and what strategies they adopt to mitigate them. To realize the authors’ aim, the authors conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 34 peer-reviewed retrieved from Scopus database. Gender microaggressions manifest commonly as perceived incompetence, second-class citizenship, assumed inferiority, traditional gender roles, and sexual objectification. Perpetrators of gender microaggressions fail to recognize the habitual occurrence and severity of their offense hence assuming a defensive stance when confronted. Targets are found to experience depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, and lowered self-esteem. Existing scholarship argues that coping strategies adopted by women to counter gender microaggressions function as a protection against their adverse effects. The SLR serves as a pointer to practitioners of diversity to address the systemic occurrence of gender microaggressions within the academia, workplaces, and society at large and hence provide for a toxic-free environment for women.