Implicit androcentrism: Men are human, women are gendered

By April H. Bailey, Marianne LaFrance, John F. Dovidio. 2020

43 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract People think of certain social roles (e.g., scientists) as being men, but perhaps even more fundamentally, people also tend to think of a person as a man. People list men more often than women as examples of humanity and describe men with generic labels (e.g., the person) but use gender-specific labels (e.g., the woman) for women. This is especially true of male respondents. Much of the research on this androcentric tendency to conflate men with people has measured more controllable behaviors. The present studies instead investigated androcentrism using adaptations of the implicit association test (IAT). The IAT more closely captures theoretically relevant categorization cognitive processes; responses on the IAT are more difficult to control and thus suitable for socially-sensitive topics like gender bias; and the IAT can help to explain gender differences in androcentrism. Results from three studies showed that participants associated broad human concepts (e.g., person) with men more than women (Studies 1–3), and gender-specific concepts (e.g., woman) with women more than men (Studies 2–3). These IAT associations were larger for male (vs. female) participants (Studies 1–3) and for participants exposed to a male-emphasizing (vs. gender-inclusive) term for humanity (i.e., mankind; Study 3). Participants were also more likely to notice a semantic redundancy between being male and being human compared to the same redundancy concerning women (Studies 2–3). Together, these findings support a categorization-based theoretical account of androcentrism, advancing understanding of the nature of androcentrism and gender differences therein.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

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Citations in the corpus

Queens Are Powerful Too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation (2019, background): “…increase the chances of biases such as androcen-trism , or the propensity of societies to consider men central but women peripheral (Bem, 1993; Bailey et al., 2020); in language, male-gendered words often act as a gender-neutral standard (Bai-ley et al., 2019), as in Neil Armstrong’s 1969…”