Gender differences in the organization of sexual information

One widely used model of knowledge representation is that of a network in which concepts are portrayed as nodes with links between the nodes representing associations. Schvaneveldt (1990) developed a method (Pathfinder) that generates associative networks from individual's ratings of similarity of word pairs. We had 51 female and 47 male undergraduates rare for similarity all paired combinations of 16 words judged as relevant to the domain of sexuality. Using a measure of network similarity, we found that each gender's networks were more similar to each other than they were to the other gender's. Using the number of links on words as the dependent variable there were gender differences in the number of links within clusters of words, between clusters of words, and on specific words. These differences, for the most part, are consistent with gender stereotypes and prior research showing gender differences in the processing of sexual information.