Abstract
Previous studies conducted in the United States indicate that people associate numbers with gender, such that odd numbers are more likely to be considered male and even numbers considered female. It has been argued that this number gendering phenomenon is acquired through social learning and conditioning, and that male-odd/female-even associations reflect a general, cross-cultural human consensus on gender roles relating to agency and communion. However, the incidence and pattern of number gendering in cultures outside the United States remains to be established. Against this background, the purpose of this study was to determine whether people from a culture and country very different from the United States (specifically, native Arabic citizens living in the Arabic culture of the United Arab Emirates) also associate numbers with gender, and, if they do, whether the pattern of these associations is the male-odd/female-even associations previously observed. To investigate this issue, we adopted the Implicit Association Test used frequently in previous research, where associations between numbers (odd and even) and gender (male and female faces) were examined using male and female Arabic participants native to, and resident in, the United Arab Emirates. The findings indicated that the association of numbers with gender does occur in Arabic culture. But while Arabic females associated odd numbers with male faces and even numbers with female faces (the pattern of previous findings in the United States), Arabic males showed the reversed pattern of gender associations, associating even numbers with male faces and odd numbers with female faces. These findings support the view that number gendering is indeed a cross-cultural phenomenon and show that the phenomenon occurs across very different countries and cultures. But the findings also suggest that the pattern with which numbers are associated with gender is not universal and, instead, reflects culture-specific views on gender roles which may change across cultures and gender. Further implications for understanding the association of numbers with gender across human societies are discussed.
Highlights
Social conditioning develops early in life (e.g., Bussey and Bandura, 1999; Martin and Ruble, 2010; Martin and Slepian, 2018) and goes on to instill concepts of gender that influence substantially the ways in which humans perceive their social world
The rationale and design of the experiment we report followed the approach adopted by Wilkie and Bodenhausen (2012, 2015) and used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998) to assess implicit associations between odd and even numbers and male and female gender
Response options were “male face or odd number” and “female face or even number” while in the other response condition, response options were “female face or odd number” and “male face or even number.”. The logic of this approach in the IAT is that response combinations of faces and numbers that are more associated in memory should be easier to process than the reverse combinations, and this processing difference should be revealed by faster reaction times for the more associated response combinations
Summary
Social conditioning develops early in life (e.g., Bussey and Bandura, 1999; Martin and Ruble, 2010; Martin and Slepian, 2018) and goes on to instill concepts of gender that influence substantially the ways in which humans perceive their social world. The number 2 has a numerical value which suggests togetherness and cooperation, and a visually rounded appearance, all widelyheld stereotypically feminine qualities consistent with relational themes of communion and collectivism, both of which are associated with people concerned primarily with the groups to which they belong and for which they care, in exchange for group loyalty (see Hofstede and Bond, 1984; Triandis, 1989; Triandis and Gelfand, 1998) These perceptions of an individualistic 1 and a collectivistic 2, Wilkie and Bodenhausen (2012, 2015) argued, influence people’s perceptions of other numbers within the same category (odd or even) and produce a widespread, cross-cultural tendency for humans to form the same pattern of male-odd and female-even associations between gender and numbers. Response options were “male face or odd number” and “female face or even number” while in the other response condition, response options were “female face or odd number” and “male face or even number.” The logic of this approach in the IAT is that response combinations of faces and numbers that are more associated in memory (e.g., male faces and odd numbers; female faces and even numbers) should be easier to process than the reverse combinations (female faces and odd numbers; male faces and even numbers), and this processing difference should be revealed by faster reaction times for the more associated response combinations (see Greenwald et al, 1998, for further discussion)
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