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Seeing the World in Pink and Blue: Developing and Exploring a New Measure of Essentialistic Thinking about Gender

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Abstract

Essentialism, or the belief that certain categories have fundamental, intrinsic, and stable essences, pervasively influences social judgments. Among the many groupings that describe people, gender is the most essentialized category yet relatively little is known about individual differences in gender essentialism. To explore this construct in Study 1 with 2996 U.S. participants, we developed a new measure, named the Gender Essentialism Measure (GEM), that offers two advantages over prior measures: (a) we used Item Response Theory to optimize the measure’s psychometrics and (b) we adopted a multidimensional conceptualization, incorporating four core facets of gender essentialism (Biological Determinism, Social Determinism, Immutability, and Inductive Potential). Study 2 used a large U.S. sample (n = 2803) to characterize individual differences in essentialistic thinking about gender. Gender essentialism was associated with endorsement of sexism, system-justifying ideologies, relatively inflexible and dispositional thinking about others, and lesser empathic concern and perspective-taking. Studies 3 and 4, using samples of 133 and 118 U.S. participants, respectively, demonstrated that gender essentialism predicts greater acceptance of existing gender disparities. Our research indicates that understanding and addressing the societal and personal impact of gender stereotyping would benefit from going beyond sexism to also considering the role of essentialistic thinking about gender. The GEM offers researchers, practitioners, and policymakers a psychometrically optimized, multi-faceted tool to assess the extent and prevalence of gender-essentialistic beliefs.

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Correspondence to Harry T. Reis.

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All procedures performed in these studies were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (Research Subjects Review Board #00057154) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Lee, K.Y., Reis, H.T. & Rogge, R.D. Seeing the World in Pink and Blue: Developing and Exploring a New Measure of Essentialistic Thinking about Gender. Sex Roles 83, 685–705 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01141-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-020-01141-1

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