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Abstract
The present research investigated the use of counter-stereotypical pictures as a strategy for overcoming spontaneous gender stereotypes when certain social role nouns and professional terms are read. Across two experiments, participants completed a judgment task in which they were presented with word pairs comprised of a role noun with a stereotypical gender bias (e.g., beautician) and a kinship term with definitional gender (e.g., brother). Their task was to quickly decide whether or not both terms could refer to one person. In each experiment they completed two blocks of such judgment trials separated by a training session in which they were presented with pictures of people working in gender counter-stereotypical (Experiment 1) or gender stereotypical roles (Experiment 2). To ensure participants were focused on the pictures, they were also required to answer four questions on each one relating to the character’s leisure activities, earnings, job satisfaction, and personal life. Accuracy of judgments to stereotype incongruent pairings was found to improve significantly across blocks when participants were exposed to counter-stereotype images (9.87%) as opposed to stereotypical images (0.12%), while response times decreased significantly across blocks in both studies. It is concluded that exposure to counter-stereotypical pictures is a valuable strategy for overcoming spontaneous gender stereotype biases in the short term.
Highlights
While English has a number of personal nouns that include maleness or femaleness as part of their lexical definitions, or are formally marked for lexical gender through the use of suffixes, the majority of human nouns in English are not gender specific
In the by-items analyses (F2), Stereotype was included as a betweenitems factor while Kinship term gender, block of trials (Block) and Participant Sex were included as within-item variables
While accuracy remained significantly lower to the incongruent pairs than to the stereotype congruent and neutral pairings in Block 2, response times (RTs) in Block 2 were similar in all three conditions
Summary
While English has a number of personal nouns that include maleness or femaleness as part of their lexical definitions (e.g., father, girl, son), or are formally marked for lexical gender through the use of suffixes (e.g., waitress, landlord, landlady), the majority of human nouns in English are not gender specific. Gender information associated with a human noun is typically indicated through social gender This term refers to stereotypical assumptions about appropriate male and female social roles and the extent to which those roles are filled by females or males (Hellinger and Bußmann, 2001). Social gender is more commonly referred to as gender (stereo)typicality and is defined as the likelihood of a noun referring to women or men (Irmen and Roßberg, 2004). This gender typicality plays an important role in building cognitive representations of gender and is the reason why people come to expect, for example, surgeons to be male and nurses to be female.
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