Breaking Away From the Male Stereotype of a Specialist: Gendered Language Affects Performance in a Thinking Task.

ABSTRACT: This experimental online-survey study investigated if different written language forms in German have an effect on male bias in thinking. We used answers to the specialist riddle as an indicator for male bias in mental representations of expertise. The difficulty of this thinking task lies in the fact that a gender-unspecified specialist is often automatically assumed to be a man due to gender stereotypes. We expected that reading a text in gender-fair language before processing the specialist riddle helps readers achieve control over automatically activated gender stereotypes and thus facilitates the restructuring and reinterpretation of the problem, which is necessary to reach the conclusion that the specialist is a woman. We randomly assigned 517 native German speakers (68% women

SUBMITTER: Kollmayer M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6018092 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature