Occupational roles rather than sex drive gender stereotypes

Evidence

Eagly and Steffen (1984) found that gender stereotypes are derived from assumptions about men and women occupying different roles. In particular, it was demonstrated that people judge women to be “communal” because it is consistent with their assumed “homemaker” role, and they judge men to be “agentic” because it is consistent with their assumed role of “employee.” Thus, male homemakers were rated to be as communal as female homemakers and more communal than females whose occupation was unspecified, while female employees were seen as more agentic than male employees and males with no occupational description given. Eagly and Steffen (1986) extended these results by demonstrating that part-time female employees were stereotyped as more communal and less agentic than full-time female employees, and part-time male employees were judged to be less agentic than full-time male employees. The authors argued that “the proximal cause of gender stereotypes is the differing distributions of women and men into social roles” (Eagly & Steffen, 1984, p. 752), because people’s stereotypes were mediated by their beliefs about the targets’ occupations. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2919

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes social role theory of gender differences; also connects to the ‘immodesty’ article’s treatment of how role-linked dress norms shift. — connects to: Fromm read gender roles as socially and economically determined, not essential — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 336
• DEEPTHINKING: Demonstrates a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism: swap the roles and the stereotypes swap too — strong evidence stereotypes rationalize arrangements rather than reflect innate differences.