The authors argue that complementary hostile and benevolent components of sexism exist across cultures.Male dominance creates hostile sexism (HS), but men's dependence on women fosters benevolent sexism (BS)--subjectively positive attitudes that put women on a pedestal but reinforce their subordination.Research with 15,000 men and women in 19 nations showed that (a) HS and BS are coherent constructs that correlate positively across nations, but (b) HS predicts the ascription of negative and BS the ascription of positive traits to women, (c) relative to men, women are more likely to reject HS than BS, especially when overall levels of sexism in a culture are high, and (d) national averages on BS and HS predict gender inequality across nations.These results challenge prevailing notions of prejudice as an antipathy in that BS (an affectionate, patronizing ideology) reflects inequality and is a cross-culturally pervasive complement to HS.The idea that "prejudice is an antipathy" (Allport, 1954, p. 9) is the bedrock on which virtually all prejudice theories are built.This assumption has blinded social psychologists to the true nature of sexism (and perhaps other prejudices as well; see Fiske, Xu, Cuddy, & Glick, 1999; Glick & Fiske, in press;Jackman, 1994), which encompasses not just hostile sexism (HS) but also benevolent sexism (BS), a subjectively positive orientation of protection, idealization, and affection directed toward women that, like HS, serves to justify women's subordinate status to men (Glick & Fiske, 1996).Whereas HS is likely to elicit women's outrage, BS may often obtain their acquiescence, as it works effectively and invisibly to promote gender inequality.We present evidence that (a) HS and BS are pervasive across cultures, supporting the contention that they originate in social and biological factors common among human groups, (b) HS and BS are complementary ideologies, such that nations in which HS is strongly endorsed are those in which BS is strongly endorsed, (c) HS and BS predict opposing valences in attitudes toward women,