Taking and developing pictures in the head: Assessing the physical stereotypes of eight gender types

This paper examines college students' mental images, or pictures in the head, of 4 female types (housewife, whore, career woman, feminist) and 4 male types (business executive, ladies' man, homosexual, nerd). Consensual stereotypes of the gender types were extracted from the reported images through a content analysis. There was considerable agreement in the descriptions of the images, suggesting that American college students have shared pictures in the head of these 8 consensual gender types. As predicted, the physical stereotypes of each type followed from the gender-role variant each represents (e.g., the whore, whose "sub-role" and goals require catching males' attention and interest, was imaged as wearing sexually alluring clothing). We suggest that these physical stereotypes may serve a critical role in gender categorization and stereotyping processes.