School, Studying, and Smarts: Gender Stereotypes and Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930-2009* Andrei Boutyline University of Michigan Alina Arseniev-Koehler University of California, Los Angeles Devin J. Cornell Duke University May 22, 2020 * We thank Elizabeth Armstrong, Elizabeth Bruch, Erin Cech, Fabiana Silva, and Mark Mizruchi for reading the manuscript and providing insightful commentary. We also thank attendees at the University of Michigan Measuring and Modeling Culture workshop and the University of Chicago Computational Social Science workshop for their feedback. We are grateful to Yinan Wang and Hannah Simon for their help as undergraduate research assistants. We are also grateful to the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute for bringing us together and providing the opportunity to begin this collaboration. Please direct all correspondence to Andrei Boutyline at Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, Room 3115 LSA Building, 500 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Email:
[email protected] ABSTRACT Gender stereotypes have important consequences for boys’ and girls’ academic outcomes. In this article, we apply computational word embeddings to a 200-million-word corpus of American print media (1930-2009) to examine how these stereotypes changed as women’s educational attainment caught up with and eventually surpassed men’s. This transformation presents a rare opportunity to observe how stereotypes change alongside the reversal of an important pattern of stratification. We track six stereotypes that prior work has linked to academic outcomes. Our results suggest that stereotypes of socio-behavioral skills and problem behaviors—attributes closely tied to the core stereotypical distinction between women as communal and men as agentic—remained unchanged.