Reminding May Not Be Enough: Overcoming the Male Dominance of the Generic Masculine

Abstract

In gender-marked languages, masculine and feminine grammatical forms are distinct, with the masculine form also used for gender-mixed groups (generic masculine). Previous research indicates that the generic masculine elicits male-biased representations. Psychologically, this may be due to a misunderstanding of the communicative intention, an automatic activation of male associations, or both. In two preregistered experiments, we tested whether the male bias is affected by emphasizing the generic intention. Adding contextual information that conveyed a group's gender-mixed composition eliminated the male bias (Study 1). However, the male bias remained robust when continuously reminding participants of the generic intention via a novel grammatical marker (Study 2). These results suggest that the male bias is partly driven by associative processes that are immune against a purely explicit disambiguation of the generic intention.