People seem to represent men and women in a conceptually balanced manner: for example, seeing women as warm (not agentic) and men as agentic (not warm). Emerging evidence, however, suggests people might represent them as imbalanced: women as one thing and men as many things. We argue that people describe men and women as balanced, symmetrical opposites when thinking of them in terms of their gender category-a gender framing often evoked by common methods. However, in the absence of this framing (e.g., in naturalistic contexts), women stand out as a gender category more than men, creating conceptual imbalance. In these contexts, people represent women more narrowly while affording men a wider array of attributes-even attributes traditionally linked to women (e.g., warmth).
Bailey et al. (Sun,) studied this question.