Man, You Might Look Like a Woman-If a Child Is Next to You

Abstract

Gender categorization seems prone to a pervasive bias: Persons about whom null or ambiguous gender information is available are more often considered male than female. Our study assessed whether such a male-bias is present in non-binary choice tasks and whether it can be altered by social contextual information. Participants were asked to report their perception of an adult figure's gender in three context conditions: (1) alone, (2) passively besides a child, or (3) actively helping a child (n = 10 pictures each). The response options male, female and I don't know were provided. As a result, participants attributed male gender to most figures and rarely used the I don't know option in all conditions, but were more likely to attribute female gender to the same adult figure if it was shown with a child. If such social contextual information was provided in the first rather than the second block of the experiment, subsequent female gender attributions increased for adult figures shown alone. Additionally, female gender attributions for actively helping relative to passive adults were made more often. Thus, we provide strong evidence that gender categorization can be altered by social context even if the subject of gender categorization remains identical.

Keywords: gender categorization; male-bias; sex; social context; social perception.

Figure 1.

Stimuli for the three different conditions for one example situation. Pictures were generated in order to ensure maximum similarity between conditions. Arrows’ labels describe changes made for generating pictures with differing social context. Dashed frames group context conditions according to blocks within which pictures were randomized.

Figure 2.

Time sequence for one example trial. All pictures were shown for 6 s, preceded by a 5 s preparation interval and followed by 5 s for responding. The order of pictures was pre-randomized within each block.

Figure 3.

Mean difference between the proportion of male and female responses (a, c) and mean proportion of I don’t know responses (b, d) on the y axis for each context condition on the x axis in Experiment 1 (top) and the control Experiment 2 (bottom). Gray shading marks conditions that were shown in the first block of each experiment. Cat’s eyes represent 95% within-subject CI s. Non-overlapping CIs indicate meaningful differences between conditions. Dots mark magnitude of these differences; ••d >> 1.00, •d > 0.50.

Figure 4.

Proportion of response alterations within pictures of one situation in Experiment 1. Changes were counted and categorized between adult alone and social passive (a) as well as between social passive and social helping conditions (b). As in Figure 1, example pictures are framed according to condition (black = adult alone, light gray = social passive, dark gray = social helping). Cat’s eyes represent 95% CI s.

Figure 5.

Proportion of response alterations within pictures of one situation in Experiment 2. Changes were counted and categorized between social passive and social helping (a), social passive and adult alone (b) as well as between social helping and adult alone conditions (c). As in Figure 1, example pictures are framed according to condition (black = adult alone, light gray = social passive, dark gray = social helping). Cat’s eyes represent 95% CI s.