Abstract
Most research to date on implicit gender stereotyping has been conducted with one age group – young adults. The mechanisms that underlie the on-line processing of stereotypical information in other age groups have received very little attention. This is the first study to investigate real time processing of gender stereotypes at different age levels. We investigated the activation of gender stereotypes in Italian in four groups of participants: third- and fifth-graders, young and older adults. Participants heard a noun that was stereotypically associated with masculine (preside “headmaster”) or feminine roles (badante “social care worker”), followed by a male (padre “father”) or female kinship term (madre “mother”). The task was to decide if the two words – the role noun and the kinship term – could describe the same person. Across all age groups, participants were significantly faster to respond, and significantly more likely to press ‘yes,’ when the gender of the target was congruent with the stereotypical gender use of the preceding prime. These findings suggest that information about the stereotypical gender associated with a role noun is incorporated into the mental representation of this word and is activated as soon as the word is heard. In addition, our results show differences between male and female participants of the various age groups, and between male- and female-oriented stereotypes, pointing to important gender asymmetries.
Highlights
IntroductionFor better or worse, occurs frequently in everyday life. We seem to readily attribute masculine gender to doctors, surgeons, and politicians, and feminine gender to nurses, school teachers, and secretaries
Gender stereotyping, for better or worse, occurs frequently in everyday life
These studies have shown that stereotypical gender information is incorporated into the mental representation of the role noun in question, and that gender activation occurs at the time a role noun is encoded (Oakhill et al, 2005; Siyanova-Chanturia et al, 2012)
Summary
For better or worse, occurs frequently in everyday life. We seem to readily attribute masculine gender to doctors, surgeons, and politicians, and feminine gender to nurses, school teachers, and secretaries. It has been widely documented that when language users encounter stereotypically incongruent information (male nurse or female doctor), their processing slows down (Banaji and Hardin, 1996; Carreiras et al, 1996; Garnham et al, 2002; Duffy and Keir, 2004; Oakhill et al, 2005; Cacciari and Padovani, 2007; Kreiner et al, 2008; Pyykkönen et al, 2010; Siyanova-Chanturia et al, 2012) These studies have shown that stereotypical gender information is incorporated into the mental representation of the role noun in question (doctors/surgeons/politicians are assumed to be males, while nurses/teachers/secretaries are assumed to be females), and that gender activation occurs at the time a role noun is encoded (Oakhill et al, 2005; Siyanova-Chanturia et al, 2012). There is relatively little data that indicate whether the stereotypicality effects vary with the sex of the participants or with the gender indicated by the linguistic items involved
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