Understanding Gender Differences in Acceptance of Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: Are Women Truly More Accepting Than Men?

A surprisingly consistent finding from the global health literature on physical intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) indicates that women self-report greater agreement with statements justifying IPVAW than men. This pattern has been interpreted as evidence of women's internalization of inequitable gender norms and used to support the development of intervention programs that target harmful beliefs about the acceptability of IPVAW among men and women. Here, we propose an alternative explanation that apparent gender differences in the acceptance of IPVAW reflect an artifact of social desirability bias. To investigate this proposition, we utilize attitudinal data on IPVAW from 317 married couples in Northwestern, Tanzania, combining a conventional self-report measure and a novel indirect wife-reported measure of men's attitudes, which we suggest represent a more accurate representation of men's true beliefs. Consistent with prior studies, comparisons of self-reported beliefs indicate that women report greater acceptance of IPVAW than men. However, the direction of this difference is reversed when men's beliefs are measured using indirect wife-reported estimates, with men accepting IPVAW more than women. Our results provide a parsimonious explanation to a widely reported, but paradoxical, finding in the IPVAW literature, and highlight the inadequacies of self-report data in research on sensitive topics. We suggest that future studies of IPVAW more strongly weigh the relevance of social desirability bias and invest in the continued development of indirect and mixed-methods designs in the measure of IPVAW attitudes and behavior.