Gender stereotypes have changed: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of U.S. public opinion polls from 1946 to 2018.

By A. Eagly, C. Nater, David I Miller, Michèle C. Kaufmann, Sabine Sczesny. 2020

907 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This meta-analysis integrated 16 nationally representative U.S. public opinion polls on gender stereotypes (N = 30,093 adults), extending from 1946 to 2018, a span of seven decades that brought considerable change in gender relations, especially in women's roles. In polls inquiring about communion (e.g., affectionate, emotional), agency (e.g., ambitious, courageous), and competence (e.g., intelligent, creative), respondents indicated whether each trait is more true of women or men, or equally true of both. Women's relative advantage in communion increased over time, but men's relative advantage in agency showed no change. Belief in competence equality increased over time, along with belief in female superiority among those who indicated a sex difference in competence. Contemporary gender stereotypes thus convey substantial female advantage in communion and a smaller male advantage in agency but also gender equality in competence along with some female advantage. Interpretation emphasizes the origins of gender stereotypes in the social roles of women and men. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Investigating Failures of Automatic Translation in the Case of Unambiguous Gender (2021, background): “Our list of adjectives is the union of stereotyped traits from several works in the social psychology literature on traits as gender stereotyping (Bem, 1981; Prentice and Carranza, 2002; Haines et al., 2016; Eagly et al., 2020), where they were normed in the context of English.”
Marked Personas: Using Natural Language Prompts to Measure Stereotypes in Language Models (2023, background): “Marked Personas enables us to capture specific stereotypes even as they are culturally dependent and constantly evolving (Madon et al., 2001; Eagly et al., 2020).”
Gender Stereotypes in Natural Language: Word Embeddings Show Robust Consistency Across Child and Adult Language Corpora of More Than 65 Million Words (2021, neutral): “…psychological measures (e.g., on male–science/female–arts associations; Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019; Miller et al., 2018) but stand in contrast to trends of increasing (or stable) ste-reotypes for other domains (e.g., female–communion associations have increased over time; Eagly et al., 2020).”
Leadership During Crisis: An Examination of Supervisory Leadership Behavior and Gender During COVID-19 (2021, background): “…literature shows the persistence of prescriptive stereotypes of women as more communal and men as more agentic (e.g., Duehr & Bono, 2006; Eagly et al., 2019; Zehnter et al., 2018) despite little differences in behavior (Eagly & Johnson, 1990) as well as backlash toward agentic women…”
Undesirable biases in NLP: Averting a crisis of measurement (2022, background): “Gender stereotypes can refer to a broad category of phenomena where certain genders are associated with social norms, roles, or attributes and traits (e.g., women are seen as more passive; Eagly et al., 2020).”