5.2: Gender Stereotypes- Content and Structure

Prescriptions and Proscriptions

Gender stereotypes operate in part on trait expectations, split in binary ways. Gender prescriptions dictate traits people should have: women should be nurturing, modest, and physically attractive in feminine ways; men should be assertive, stoic, and physically strong. Gender proscriptions dictate traits someone should not have: women should not be aggressive or sexually forward; men should not be emotional or physically delicate. Together, prescriptive and proscriptive traits function as a set of rules. These rules extend to physical appearance as well. Expectations for body size, grooming, clothing, and self-presentation are all tied to gender, and violations of appearance norms can trigger the same social consequences as violations of behavioral norms. When exceptions emerge, they tend to be repackaged in ways that preserve the gender hierarchy rather than challenge it. For example, the growth of men's grooming and skincare has been marketed through masculinized language like "performance" products and "manscaping," framing self-care as compatible with masculinity only by stripping it of any association with femininity. We will examine those consequences in Section 5.6.

Communion and Agency

The content of gender stereotypes tends to cluster around two broad trait dimensions. Communion refers to traits associated with warmth, nurturance, and orientation toward others, including gentleness, emotionality, and cooperation. Agency refers to traits associated with competence, assertiveness, and individual achievement, including dominance, independence, and self-confidence. Women are stereotypically associated with communion, and men with agency (Eagly & Wood, 2012). As we discussed in Chapter 4, biosocial constructionist theory argues that these associations developed from historical divisions of labor and are maintained through the social roles each society assigns to men and women. Importantly, both men and women display both communal and agentic traits. The stereotype is not that one group has these traits and the other does not, but that each group should have them, and should not display too much of the other set.

Benevolent Sexism

Research has found that people generally rate women more favorably than men on communion, a pattern known as the women-are-wonderful effect (Eagly & Mladinic, 1994). However, this favorable view applies primarily to women who conform to traditional feminine roles (Anderson, 2014). Women who violate prescriptive stereotypes by being assertive, ambitious, or unfeminine do not receive the same positive evaluations. This pattern is central to what Glick and Fiske (1996) call benevolent sexism, one half of their broader framework of ambivalent sexism. Benevolent sexism frames women in positive terms, but that positive regard is conditional. A benevolent sexist believes women are deserving of protection, admiration, and care. However, this applies only to women who conform to traditionally feminine roles. It rewards conformity while setting consequences for nonconformity. Consider a manager who praises a new mother's dedication to her family and, for that same reason, keeps her off the high-stakes account "so she isn't overwhelmed." The warmth is sincere, but it still stalls her career. The other half of ambivalent sexism, hostile sexism, is more explicit, with openly negative attitudes toward women. We will return to hostile sexism in Chapter 10.

Generic Gender? Beyond the ‘Everyman’ and ‘Everywoman’

Gender stereotypes are supposed to apply to everyone based on their gender. But gender does not operate in isolation from other social categories. When gender intersects with race, ethnicity, sexuality, or class, it produces specific subtypes with their own distinct stereotype profiles (Ghavami & Peplau, 2013). For example, stereotypes of Latina women emphasize warmth and physical attractiveness, while stereotypes of Latino men emphasize both work ethic and aggression. Notably, Ghavami and Peplau found that the "generic" stereotype of women most closely matched stereotypes of white women specifically. This means that when researchers study gender stereotypes without specifying race, what they tend to capture are the stereotypes of white men and white women. The distinct stereotype profiles that exist for people of color remain invisible unless a study is specifically designed to examine them, and most studies are not.

Research on stereotypes of transgender people is even more limited, though it is growing. The research so far suggests that trans individuals are often stereotyped as confused or even purposefully deceptive. For example, trans women may be stereotyped as men pretending to be women, which combines gender stereotypes with assumptions about dishonesty and compounds the discrimination trans women face. Cisgender participants in one study generated unique stereotypes about transgender people, such as "mentally ill" and "confused," that did not appear in their stereotypes of cisgender people (Howansky et al., 2019). Research also suggests that people higher in gender essentialism (the belief that gender is fixed and biologically determined) are more likely to stereotype transgender people based on their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity (Gallagher & Bodenhausen, 2021). Research on stereotypes of nonbinary people is only just emerging. Early findings suggest that nonbinary individuals are perceived as neither particularly masculine nor feminine, and that cisgender perceivers often lack a clear framework for categorizing them at all (McCarty & Burt, 2024). As with much of the research in this chapter, these studies have been conducted primarily with white Western samples and represent only the beginning of what needs to be a much broader investigation.

Similar to stereotypes of people who are trans or nonbinary, stereotypes about sexual orientation are intertwined with gender stereotypes. As discussed in Chapter 1, heteronormativity treats heterosexuality as the default, and any deviation from it requires explanation. One historical framework that shaped these assumptions is sexual inversion theory, which posited that gay men and lesbian women had the external appearance of one sex but the internal experience of the other. Although the theory has long been discredited, its legacy persists in contemporary stereotypes: gay men are stereotyped as feminine, and lesbian women as masculine, as if same-sex attraction must involve a crossing of gender lines (Kite & Deaux, 1987). These stereotypes illustrate how tightly gender and sexuality are linked in cultural thinking: to deviate from one set of norms (heterosexuality) is assumed to mean deviating from the other (gender conformity). Heterosexual people are rarely studied as a stereotyped group, but when they are, the stereotypes that emerge are highly gendered (heterosexual men as macho and aggressive, heterosexual women as hyperfeminine and submissive) and tend to match the "generic" stereotypes of men and women described earlier in this section (Matsick & Conley, 2016). This confirms that the default "man" and "woman" in stereotype research is implicitly heterosexual, just as it is implicitly white.

Understanding what stereotypes contain, however, is only part of the picture. The next section examines why stereotypes exist in the first place: the cognitive processes that create, maintain, and resist changing them.

Section Key Terms