Describe the findings of Williams and Best’s (1990) cross-cultural analysis of gender stereotypes and its implications for the universality of gender stereotypes. Then describe Cuddy and colleagues’ (2015) reanalysis of this data. Discuss its implications for the universality of gender stereotypes and how they may relate to systems of status and power.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Williams and Best (1990) presented university students in 27 different cultures with a list of 300 adjectives and asked them to indicate whether each adjective was associated more frequently with women or men. Across cultures, women were consistently associated with traits such as nurturance, agreeableness, and affection, while men were consistently associated with traits such as adventurousness, independence, and dominance. This suggests that gender stereotypes are somewhat universal across culture. Cuddy and colleagues (2015) reanalyzed this data while selecting 21 traits clearly capturing individualism and 27 traits clearly capturing collectivism. They found that while only looking at these subsets of traits, the more individualistic a nation was, the more people in that nation associated individualistic traits with men. Similarly, the more collectivistic a nation was, the more people in that nation associated collectivistic traits with men. This suggests that the contents of stereotypes may not be as universal as the Williams and Best (1990) analysis originally indicated. However, the tendency to ascribe a culture’s most desirable traits to the dominant sex was universal in Cuddy and colleagues reanalysis. This suggests that gender stereotypes may serve as a means by which high status groups maintain power over low status groups.