Two studies examined whether subtle variations in feminine appearance erroneously convey a woman’s likelihood of being a scientist. Eighty photos (half women) of tenured/tenure-track science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) faculty at elite research universities were selected from the Internet. Participants, naïve to the targets’ occupations, rated the photos on femininity and likeliho...

We conducted an in vivo pilot study to evaluate the pressure exerted by a feminine hygiene pad worn in the traditional way in the genital area and behind the knee, as measured using a novel pressure sensor device. The purpose was to determine whether pressure measured behind the knee correlated with genital pressure, thereby showing that behind-the-knee pressure measurements could be extrapolat...

This investigation examined children's memory for stereotypic and reverse-stereotypic sex role content in their reading material. In experiment 1, lists of traits and behaviors deemed typical of boys and girls were obtained from 2 classrooms of fifth-grade students. 4 experimental stories were developed from these lists of stereotypic items, each depicting a male and female character who exhibi...

Though Mexican cinema has been the object of numerous studies, few of these refer to the process of audience reception: to that intimate moment of cinematic communication in which the gazing subject discovers part of its identity while simultaneously appropriating the film. In this article I would like to share the findings of a research project that advances the study of audience reception fro...

Testosterone is typically understood to contribute to maleness and masculinity, although it also responds to behaviors such as competition. Competition is crucial to evolution and may increase testosterone but also is selectively discouraged for women and encouraged for men via gender norms. We conducted an experiment to test how gender norms might modulate testosterone as mediated by two possi...

Children in the 2nd through 6th grade wrote reports about their favorite educational and informational television programs, and the reports were examined for the presence of gender stereotypes. Children’s written reports contained more male than female characters, more male than female pronouns, and more masculine than feminine behaviors. Effects were most pronounced for boys. Over time, preado...