Campaigns and initiatives aimed at advancing equity for girls and women often reference gender—“The future is female” or “Fight like a girl,” for instance. However, is such messaging effective in championing their abilities and in inspiring others?
A study by a team of psychology researchers suggests it’s not. It shows that messages referencing gender in trumpeting female accomplishments in an activity can actually diminish perceptions of girls’ and women’s abilities—among children and adults of both genders. Moreover, these messages appear to reduce interest in participating in the activity itself.
“While often well-meaning, gendered messaging does not always promote more positive perceptions of women or girls—in fact, it can backfire, as our research shows,” says April Bailey, a faculty member at the University of Edinburgh and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
“This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate women’s achievements—visibility still matters,” adds Andrei Cimpian, a psychology professor at New York University and the paper’s senior author. “What’s counterproductive is highlighting women’s gender as the reason for celebration.”
The thinking behind gendered messaging—such as “Space4Women,” “Women’s Chess Champion,” or “Coding for Girls”—is that mentioning gender sends a positive message because it shows that girls and women are active and successful in a field. However, it’s possible that it can have the opposite effect: By specifically pointing out someone’s gender, a message may suggest that girls or women are unusual or unexpected in that role—if females were seen as a normal part of the field, why mention their gender at all?
Bailey, Cimpian, and Maya Kreitman, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at the Chicago School, conducted a series of experiments to test these ideas.
How the study was conducted
The researchers asked more than 1,100 children and adults in the United States to read about made-up activities. Some participants saw descriptions that highlighted gender, such as, “A girl is the Gazzer champion,” while others saw the same information without mentioning gender, using a name instead, such as, “Joan is the Gazzer champion.” The researchers used fictional terms, such as “Gazzer,” in order to ensure that participants had no prior beliefs about who typically does the activity or how well. Any differences between the two groups, then, could only come from the way the activity was described.
In some experiments, the researchers substituted fictional groups (i.e., “Daxes”) for gender. This allowed them to determine if messaging about groups in general is problematic or, rather, if it’s messaging about familiar groups (like gender) that can backfire.
What the researchers found
Overall, the results showed that explicitly mentioning gender often backfired. Compared with using a person’s name, gender-focused descriptions led female and male participants to believe that fewer women took part in the activity. Both female and male adults were also more likely to say that women were less capable in that activity. In addition, those who read the gender-focused descriptions expressed less interest in the activities themselves.
The researchers found that these effects were stronger in adults than in children, suggesting that adults are more likely to read between the lines—inferring that highlighting gender means someone is unusual in that setting. Notably, the effect disappeared when the messages referred to fictional groups instead of real-world genders, indicating that people’s existing beliefs about women and men play an important role.
What the findings mean
The findings indicate that efforts to promote gender equality can sometimes have unintended consequences, the authors conclude.
“Our study shows that subtle communicative inferences can cause well-intentioned gendered messaging to undermine its own goals, and it suggests that, contrary to intuition, gender labels don’t simply add positive information about women’s participation and abilities,” says Cimpian.
“Rather than emphasizing that an achievement is by or for women, it may be more effective to simply show women succeeding in these fields without making gender the focus,” advises Bailey.
