I'm sunk! Help me find a picture from a gender bias study.

April 20, 2016 3:16 PM

There's a famous study of gender bias in which people were shown a picture of a person next to a sink....when the participants were told the person was female, they reported that she was washing dishes. When the participants were told the person was male, they reported that he was repairing the sink. But if it's such a famous study, why can't I find the picture?

Perhaps I have some of the details wrong? I'm not sure if the study used a photo or a drawing, and I'm not sure if there were two different versions of the picture (with a man v a woman) or if the person was androgynous and the subjects were just told the gender. My google-fu is failing. Thanks!!

posted by equipoise to Human Relations (5 answers total)

You might try asking the Sociological Images people.
posted by wintersweet at 5:02 PM on April 20, 2016

Dude, I googled the crap out of this and I couldn't find ANYTHING. So it's not just you. I'm not done, but I'm watching in hopes that someone finds it and tells us HOW.
posted by guster4lovers at 6:37 PM on April 20, 2016

I could not find anything through Google either, but I'm wondering if pictures were not used but instead the subjects were just asked to imagine a women or a man standing by a sink and then following up with a question about what the man or woman was doing when they picture them in their head?
posted by like_neon at 1:46 AM on April 21, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks, all!

like_neon, there was definitely a picture involved. But the study may well be over 15 years old, so perhaps the internet doesn't find it relevant anymore? wintersweet, that's a great resource -- thank you for introducing me to them. And thanks for trying, guster4lovers...glad to know I wasn't just missing something, but sad it's not turning up.
posted by equipoise at 10:05 AM on April 22, 2016

So, I don't know if this is what you were looking for, but it seems close enough that even if it's not, it likely would've cited your study, or your study would have cited it:

Schema-driven source misattribution errors: remembering the expected from a witnessed event. (Kleider, Pezdek, Goldinger, & Kirk, 2008)

Participants watched a slide show of a man and a woman performing stereotype-consistent and stereotype-inconsistent actions, followed by an immediate or delayed memory test. Over a two-day delay, stereotype-inconsistent actions were increasingly misremembered as having been performed by the stereotype-consistent actor (Experiment 1).

posted by miss_kitty_fantastico at 9:22 PM on April 25, 2016 [1 favorite]