Abstract
Prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to do something in the future, is strongly linked to gender stereotypes. Women are expected to play a mnemonic role in romantic heterosexual couples and be successful in prospective memory tasks. Our purpose was to test whether stereotypical expectations manifest in gender differences in remembering to perform intended actions. Furthermore, we investigated whether these differences manifest only when participants are in a relationship with an other-gender partner which puts women under higher social pressure to be effective in prospective remembering. Forty Polish women (20 in relationship, 20 out of relationship) and 40 Polish men (18 in relationship, 22 out of relationship) were asked to send a SMS text to the experimenter every day for 7 consecutive days. As predicted, a female advantage in performance was found only for participants who were in a relationship, with no gender differences among those who were not. Of particular interest was that women who were in a relationship performed better compared to women without partners. In contrast, men performed worse if they were in a relationship compared to when they did not have a partner. Implications are discussed for how gender inequalities in prospective remembering can be tackled by educators in secondary schools and psychologists who conduct premarital workshops, as well as how they can be used by couple psychotherapists to deal with crises related to the division of labor in a couple.
Highlights
Prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to do something in the future, is strongly linked to gender stereotypes
To examine whether women overall outperformed men (Hypothesis 1) and whether this gender difference was present for participants in relationships, but disappeared for participants without partners (Hypothesis 2), the mean proportions of correct prospective memory (PM) responses from seven PM opportunities were entered into a 2 (Participant Gender: woman or man) × 2 (Partnership Status: in relationship or out of relationship) factorial ANOVA
A woman is expected to play a mnemonic role for a male partner, but she is required, to a likely greater extent than a male partner, to help her children in PM tasks. This creates stronger demands toward the effectiveness of her PM and may lead to better PM performance in everyday life as compared to her male partner. To explore this alternative explanation of different patterns of gender differences in those who were in relationships and those who were not, we investigated whether the number of children with which participants lived (0–3) influenced the patterns of gender differences in PM performance
Summary
Prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to do something in the future, is strongly linked to gender stereotypes. The expectation that women should facilitate the progress of others toward their goals and care about others’ needs is an especially strong aspect of a gender stereotype and are believed to dictate a range of helping behaviours (Becker and Eagly 2004; Eagly et al 2003) This expectation is thought to manifest in women doing more work, compared to their male partners in heterosexual couples, both in terms of household labour (Bittman et al 2003; Hochschild 1989; Shelton and John 1996) and the emotional effort necessary for relationship management (Duncombe and Marsden 1993). To avoid failures on important PM tasks in everyday life, people use a wide range of memory aids that include asking others to remind them about their intended actions (Delprado et al 2013; Intons-Peterson and Fournier 1986; Maylor 1990)
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