She Sees the Trees, He Sees the Forest: Descriptive Gender Stereotypes of Concreteness and Abstractness
Authors:
Samantha Dodson, University of Calgary
Rachael D Goodwin, Syracuse University
Cheryl Wakslak, University of Southern California
Kristina Diekmann & Jesse Graham, University of Utah
Journal:
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2025)
Summary:
We test and explain descriptive expectations of men’s and women’s cognition; we are the first to show that women are described as, and expected to be, more concrete (i.e., focused on the details) whereas men are described as, and expected to be, more abstract (i.e., focused on the big-picture), which can affect work assignments, potentially perpetuating gender roles and organizational inequity.
Research Questions:
In the present research, we were interested in understanding if the construal content of employee descriptions differed by gender, and how that difference might affect work assignments.
What We Know:
Research regarding gender stereotypes about men and women typically focuses on expectations that women are and should be communal and warm, whereas men are and should be agentic and assertive. However, there is some speculation that women might also be perceived as more detail-oriented and methodical than men and as less visionary thinkers. These latter expectations about women’s and men’s capabilities do not directly map onto existing paradigms of stereotype content (i.e., warmth and agency) but are consistent with the construct of construal level or the extent to which individuals focus on the concrete details or the abstract big-picture.
It has been previously suggested that women are less able to dedicate time to thinking about abstract concepts than men because they are afforded fewer opportunities to do so via their greater home responsibilities rather than workplace participation. Building upon these ideas, we make novel connections between social role theory, which argues that gendered divisions of labor create normative expectancies regarding what men and women are like, and construal level theory to elucidate how social roles might lead women and men to exhibit differing construal-level mindsets, around which people develop descriptive, stereotypic expectations regarding women’s tendency to be detail-oriented and concrete and men’s tendency to be big picture-oriented and abstract.
Novel Findings:
More specifically, we found replicable evidence that people hold implicit and explicit descriptive stereotypes that women are more concrete than men, that women are more concrete than abstract, and that men are more abstract than concrete. In a departure from our a priori predictions, we also found in Study 4 that women were described as more abstract than men when concreteness and abstractness were measured separately. We also found that expectations of women to be more concrete than men increased the likelihood that women (rather than men) would be assigned detailed tasks at work on top of their existing workload, regardless of whether such tasks were desirable or non-desirable. Combined our findings suggest that construal-level stereotypes could both pose a challenge in achieving gender parity or provide women with opportunities for career advancement, depending upon task and role features.
Novel Methodology:
Across six studies and a meta-analysis (of 14 studies), plus three supplemental studies we found that people hold differing gendered construal-level descriptive stereotypes using varying methodologies (and across work and family contexts).
We utilized qualitative and quantitiative data including different experimental manipulations and paradigms, implicit association tests, content analysis, archival field data techniques to examine LinkedIn data, in addition to a mini meta-analysis. This strong methodological package supports our discovery of a novel construal-level stereotype.
The studies in this paper also utilized novel ways of measuring construal. We developed a validated dictionary of construal-level traits, creating a new tool to advance research in this field.
Implications for Practice:
R. We found support for this novel stereotype in several occupational classes including: architecture and engineering; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media; business and financial operations; computers and mathematics; educational instruction; healthcare practitioners and technicians.
In exploratory qualitative data collected in Study 3 and presented in the supplemental materials, we found that one commonly reported consequence of construal-level stereotypes is that women might be assigned tasks that require a high level of detail orientation more often than men. We show that gender stereotypes of construal level could also contribute to these work assignments. More specifically, we experimentally test construal-level stereotyping as an alternative mechanism that increases women’s likelihood of being assigned undesirable and desirable concrete duties relative to men. We found a stronger preference for women to complete detailed tasks when the stereotype was salient but reduced bias when a counterfactual (i.e., when men were described as more concrete than women) was presented.
Implications for Policy:
More work is needed to determine the specific implications for policy from this work, but our findings are relevant to human resource policies determining job and task assignments.
Implications for Society:
These results suggest that gender-construal expectations are deeply ingrained in society and that even in similar roles, people likely hold different expectations of women’s vs men’s construal level.
Implications for Research:
There are several research questions that could build upon our research including:
1. How, if at all, do construal-level stereotypes drive gender differences in performance on abstract and concrete tasks?
2. Are women held to unfair performance standards for highly detailed work compared to men?
3. Do women experience diminished productivity from being overly concerned about presenting themselves as detail-oriented?
4. Does the lack of fit between leadership (an abstract endeavor) and women (stereotyped as concrete) affect a) perceptions of women leaders or b) the promotion of women into leadership roles?
5. Are men’s abstract endeavors overly valued in promotion decisions?
6. Do construal-level stereotypes affect women’s interest in leadership?
7. Can women leverage abstractness to be perceived as leader-like without incurring backlash?
Abstract:
We utilize social role and construal level theories to identify and explain descriptive expectations of men’s and women’s cognition. We find find evidence of gendered construal-level stereotypes in six preregistered studies and an internal meta-analysis. First, we find that people tend to implicitly associate the names of men with high-construal terms and the names of women with low-construal terms (Study 1; N = 229). In Studies 2 (N = 150), 3 (N = 601), and 4 (N = 333), we found that people tend to describe women as more concrete (less abstract) than men in general and across 48 occupations, although Study 4 (N = 333) added nuance to the story, finding that women were also described as more abstract than men. Across these studies, we broadly found that women were described as more concrete than abstract, whereas men would be described as more abstract than concrete. These stereotypic associations were observable in the language used to recommend LinkedIn users from varying industries and occupations (Study 5; N = 549,059). Study 6 reveals that beliefs that women are more concrete than men affect their assignments to desirable and undesirable detailed tasks (N = 841), a mechanism that could perpetuate gender roles and organizational inequity. Finally, we conducted an internal meta-analysis across 14 samples to summarize the main effects. We discuss the theoretical implications of this research and provide recommendations for future research. The Supplemental Materials include three additional studies that help validate the present results.