Help
Androcentric thinking assumes maleness to be normative and attributes gender differ- ences to females. A content analysis of articles reporting gender differences published between 1965 and 2004 in four American Psychological Association journals examined androcentric pronouns, explanations, and tables and graphs. Few articles used generic masculine pronouns to refer to both women and men. However, explanations of gender differences within articles that mentioned such differences in their abstracts and titles referenced attributes of women significantly more often than attributes of men. Most tables and graphs depicting gender differences positioned males’ data before females’ data, except when gender differences among parents were concerned. Psychologists have ceased to use male-centered pronouns, but female and male psychologists con- tinue to report, explain, and depict gender differences in androcentric ways.
We review psychological evidence on androcentric biases to motivate the hypothesis that psychological research also con- structs gender differences through this cultural lens. Previous research on androcentrism has focused on verbal measures, but we argue that androcentrism is also evidenced by visuospatial representations of group differences. We report a content analysis examining verbal and visuo- spatial representations of gender differences in 40 years of psychological research, and we use our findings to reframe debates about the way in which we psychologists report gender differences and the influence of cultural values on scientific thinking within our discipline.