"A girl is the champion!": Well-intentioned gendered messages can backfire.

Abstract

Initiatives aimed at promoting gender equity in majority-male domains often emphasize gender to highlight women's achievements (e.g., "Space4Women," "all-women spacewalk"). Does such gendered messaging help achieve equity goals? Two theoretical accounts offer competing predictions. An informational account suggests that referencing a gender alongside a domain should strengthen beliefs that the referenced gender participates and succeeds. A pragmatic account, however, predicts that explicitly marking gender may backfire by signaling that the referenced gender is atypical in the domain-otherwise, why mention it? We tested these two possibilities with U.S. children (ages 4-10; N = 326) and adults (N = 788). Participants learned about fictional activities described with either gendered messaging (e.g., "A girl/boy is the Gazzer champion") or control messaging (e.g., "Joan/Rob is the Gazzer champion"). Gendered messaging backfired compared to control messaging on average, causing participants to infer lower participation by the referenced gender and, among adults, lower ability. Gendered messaging also undermined participants' interest in the activities. A meta-analysis across experiments revealed small-to-moderate effects that were larger for adults than children, consistent with developmental changes in pragmatic reasoning. Finally, backfire effects disappeared for messaging about fictional groups, suggesting that background knowledge about the referenced group may be needed to trigger pragmatic inferences. Together, these findings advance theoretical accounts of pragmatic reasoning while indicating that well-intentioned gendered messaging may paradoxically undermine equity goals. A more effective alternative may be to clearly feature women in a domain without explicitly framing it as being "for them."