Implicit androcentrism: Men are human, women are gendered

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.