Ariane Hegewisch, study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, believes there’s another element to men’s disbelief: They don’t want to believe they are benefiting from an unequal system — which would imply that they’ve been rewarded for more than just their own merits.
“You don’t want to be the bad guy, so you kind of rationalize it in your head,” Hegewisch said. “There are lots of ways of making sense of this for yourself, which doesn’t really address the kind of more structural inequalities that I would think we need to fix.”
