A Cognitive Androcentric Bias

This post was authored in collaboration with Chiara Terzo, a research fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology (Center for Translational Neurophysiology of Speech and Communication).

Despite decades of efforts to promote gender equality in our society, women still face challenges in different domains, including education, family life, and the workplace. For example, women do not receive equal treatment in hiring decisions and occupy lower status and lower-paid positions than men.

Research has shown that these gender inequalities could be pinned to a perception of women as less competent, less brilliant, or less associated with specific social roles and professions than men.

But is it possible that women are even fundamentally perceived as less representative of the broad human category and thus less associated with the concept of humanity than men?

In a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Bailey and colleagues tested such a hypothesis by means of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is a computer-based time-reaction task that assesses the strength of mental associations stored in memory. The logic of the IAT is that participants are faster and more accurate in classifying and pairing concepts that are linked in cognition than when they are not. In particular, Bailey and colleagues used the IAT to measure the mental associations between the concept "humanity" and the gender categories "women" and "men."

The results showed that participants associated human concepts (e.g., person) more with men than women. These associations were larger for male participants and when male-emphasizing terms (e.g., mankind) for humanity were used.

According to the authors, these findings reflect the presence of implicit androcentrism, i.e., an automatic tendency to prioritize men as a seemingly "gender-neutral" standard and use terms such as "person" and "mankind" to refer to people in general. This tendency seems to be related to cognitive categorization-based processes in which men are cognitively a more prototypical representation of the broad human category than women, and thus more accessible as examples of this category compared to women.

Why do men hold more androcentric beliefs than women?

Bayley and colleagues suggest that “gender differences in the IAT responses might be explained by an interplay between participants' androcentric bias and participants' chronic tendency to be egocentric and anchor on themselves." According to this view, “people might use their own gender as an anchor when thinking about humanity at large, exacerbating it among men and counteracting it among women."

What are the potential consequences of this androcentric bias?

Authors suggest that androcentric bias may be connected to substantial societal harms. “For instance, women with heart disease experience worse health outcomes than men, which is thought to be caused in part by androcentrism in medical teaching as well and an androcentric overreliance on male research participants."

In addition, they argue that the presence of an implicit androcentric bias may predict discriminatory behaviors toward women. For example, they say "most car safety mechanisms have only been tested on male-modeled crash test dummies. Implicit measures of an androcentric bias to association humanity with men might best predict why it took so long to correct this practice (the first female-modeled dummy was only introduced in the U.S. in 2013).”

What can we do then to reduce these harms?

According to the authors, “specific policies have been designed to target some of these harms; for instance, the U.S. National Institute of Health requires gender equity in research participants. Yet despite these efforts and despite general increases in gender equity norms,” this study provides “robust evidence for androcentric bias." Thus, they conclude, “more comprehensive interventions might be necessary to reduce androcentric bias, which is deeply embedded in cognition particularly among men.”