School, Studying, and Smarts: Gender Stereotypes and Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930-2009

Abstract

Gender stereotypes have important consequences for boys’ and girls’ academic outcomes. In this article, we apply computational word embeddings to a 200-million-word corpus of American print media (1930-2009) to examine how these stereotypes changed as women’s educational attainment caught up with and eventually surpassed men’s. This transformation presents a rare opportunity to observe how stereotypes change alongside the reversal of an important pattern of stratification. We track six stereotypes that prior work has linked to academic outcomes. Our results suggest that stereotypes of socio-behavioral skills and problem behaviors—attributes closely tied to the core stereotypical distinction between women as communal and men as agentic—remained unchanged. The other four stereotypes, however, became increasingly gender-polarized: as women’s academic attainment increased, school and studying gained increasingly feminine associations, whereas both intelligence and unintelligence gained increasingly masculine ones. Unexpectedly, we observe that trends in the gender associations of intelligence and studying are near-perfect mirror opposites, suggesting that they may be connected. Overall, the changes we observe appear consistent with contemporary theoretical accounts of the gender system that argue that it persists partly because surface stereotypes shift to reinterpret social change in terms of a durable hierarchical distinction between men and women.