Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Kristina A. Diekmann, Jesse Graham, Samantha Dodson, Rachael Goodwin, Cheryl Wakslak
Department of Management
Abstract
We utilize social role and construal level theories to identify and explain descriptive expectations of men’s and women’s cognition. We find evidence of
gendered construal-level stereotypes in six preregistered studies and an internal meta-analysis. First, we find that people tend to implicitly associate the names of women with low-construal terms and men with high-construal terms (Study 1; N = 229). In Studies 2 (N = 150), 3 (N = 601), and 4 (N = 333), we found that people tend to describe women as more concrete than men in general and across 48 occupations, although Study 4 (N = 333) added nuance to the story, finding that women were also described as more abstract than men. Across these studies, we also found that women were described as more concrete than abstract, whereas men would be described as more abstract than concrete. These stereotypic associations were observable in the language used to recommend LinkedIn users from varying industries and occupations (Study 5; N = 549,059). Study 6 reveals that beliefs that women are more concrete than men affect their assignments to desirable and undesirable detailed tasks (N = 841), a mechanism that could perpetuate gender roles and organizational inequity. The Supplemental Materials include three additional studies that help validate the present results. Finally, we conducted an internal meta-analysis (including supplemental and file drawer studies) to summarize the main effects. We discuss the theoretical implications of this research and provide recommendations for future research.
