Do gender stereotypes change? The dynamic of gender stereotypes in Spain

Abstract

Men and women have historically occupied different roles in society. As societies have developed, the social roles of, and the stereotypes attached to, men and women have also changed. We may, therefore, expect there to be a dynamic component of gender stereotyping that affects the perception of men and women in the past, present, and future. Although this evolution of stereotypes is fairly well developed in the literature, a replication in Spain is still missing and this study sought to address this gap. Two hundred and seventy-seven men and women (aged between 15 and 87 years old) from three regions of Spain (Andalusia, Castile-La Mancha, and Madrid) participated in this study.

In line with social role prediction studies, this research shows that gender stereotypes in Spain include dynamic aspects and that the content of these stereotypes is rooted in social roles. In general, people perceived women's roles and stereotypes to be changing more quickly over time than those of men. Women were also perceived as taking on masculine-agency characteristics, in contrast to men, who were not perceived as taking on feminine-communal characteristics. Age was a strong moderator in several interactions.

Keywords:

• stereotypes
• gender
• social role theory
• Spain

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by project N° R1/12/2010/29 given to the first author. We thank Stephanie Müeller and Mike Epps for helping in editing the manuscript.

Notes

1. We also took the sex of the participant into account as an independent variable – as no main effect was found, it was dropped from subsequent analyses. We tested compliance with the assumptions by means of homogeneity of variances/covariances.

2. Significant main effects of Year for the dimensions yielded the following statistics: masculine positive personality, F(2, 248) = 58.83; masculine negative personality, F(2, 249) = 25.02; masculine cognitive characteristics, F(2, 249) = 21.55; masculine physical characteristics, F(2, 249) = 4.89; feminine negative personality, F(2, 248) = 16.45; feminine cognitive characteristics, F(2, 249) = 14.25; feminine physical characteristics F(2, 249) = 29.54 (p's < 0.001 for all dimensions).

3. Significant interaction effects of Year × Target sex for the dimensions yielded the following statistics: masculine positive and negative personality, [F(2, 249) = 31.51 and F(2, 249) = 9.24, respectively, p's < 0.001); feminine negative personality, F(2, 248) = 3.37, p = 0.03; feminine cognitive characteristics, F(2, 249) = 3.23, p = 0.041].

4. Significant main effects of Target sex yielded the following statistics: positive personality, F(1, 249) = 62.38, p < 0.001; cognitive characteristics, F(1, 249) = 13.81, p < 0.001; and feminine physicality, F(1, 249) = 22.80, p < 0.001 and one of the masculine gender characteristics [masculine physicality, F(1, 249) = 25.09, p < 0.001].