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. The other four stereotypes, however, became increasingly gender-polarized: as women’s academic attainment increased, school and studying gained increasingly feminine associations, whereas both intelligence and unintelligence gained increasingly masculine ones. Unexpectedly, we observe that trends in the gender associations of intelligence and studying are near-perfect mirror opposites, suggesting that they may be connected. Overall, the changes we observe appear consistent with contemporary theoretical accounts of the gender system that argue that it persists partly because surface stereotypes shift to reinterpret social change in terms of a durable hierarchical distinction between men and women. School, Studying and Smarts 2 School, Studying, and Smarts: Gender Stereotypes and Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930-2009 A large body of recent work illustrates that the ways that girls and boys enact and enforce gender stereotypes powerfully shapes their academic outcomes. For example, ethnographic and survey evidence illustrates how putting effort into schoolwork or displaying an affinity for school appears to often violate boys’ norms of masculinity while fitting girls’ norms of femininity (Legewie and DiPrete 2012; Morris 2008; Musto 2019). Meanwhile, girls avoid disciplines which are perceived to require brilliance, such as physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics (Leslie et al. 2015). Many social and behavioral skills required for academic success like attentiveness, politeness and diligence also appear to be closely related to communality, which is a core aspect of hegemonic feminine stereotypes, while problem behaviors like disobedience and aggressiveness fit hegemonic masculine stereotypes (Jackson and Dempster 2009; Marrs 2016; Ridgeway 2011; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). This article leverages eight decades of U.S. print media (1930-2009) to track these gender stereotypes at scale. Despite the wealth of recent work illustrating the importance of gender stereotypes for academic outcomes, we know little about whether and how these stereotypes changed as gender differences in educational attainment drastically transformed since the 1940s1. While men reached higher levels of education than women for much of the 20th century, in recent decades this gender gap reversed, with women’s educational attainment increasingly surpassing men’s (Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006). Because gender stereotypes are partly the product of observed material differences, they respond to social change (Koenig and Eagly 2014; 1 Our data covers the years 1930 to 2009, but, as we detail below, we use 20-year-wide sliding windows to partition the corpus. The earliest resulting window is centered on 1940, and the last on 2000. DRAFT School, Studying and Smarts 3 Ridgeway et al. 2009; Seguino 2007). Therefore, the dramatic changes in women’s educational achievement throughout the twentieth century may have been accompanied by changes in the gender associations of school, studiousness, intelligence, and classroom behaviors, among other concepts. These changes in the educational landscape present a rare opportunity to observe how stereotypes change alongside the reversal of a core pattern of stratification. The longitudinal examination of these stereotypes enables us to observe which gender beliefs transform along with corresponding material changes, and which remain despite them. We use these observations to contribute to theoretical discussions about the persistence of the gender system (Ridgeway 2011; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). Additionally, given the powerful role of education in stratification and the salience of gender in the classroom, our empirical observations of these stereotypes are important contributions in their own right. These observations may enable scholars of gender in contemporary classrooms to contextualize their observations within broader historical trends. They may also inform future scholarship in the sociology of education on the gender gap reversal, which has implicitly assumed that these gender stereotypes are an important but unchanging contributor to the gender gap. As Ridgeway (2011) notes, the lack of systematic longitudinal data on gender stereotypes has hampered previous efforts to understand their historical trajectories. To overcome this problem, we examine a 200-million-word corpus of American print media (1930-2009) with Word2Vec (Mikolov, Chen, et al. 2013; Mikolov, Sutskever, et al. 2013), which is a recently developed neural network-based word embedding algorithm that has found wide application across many disciplines, but has only recently begun to see sociological uses (e.g., Joseph and Morgan 2020; Kozlowski, Taddy, and Evans 2019; Stoltz and Taylor 2019). Our approach lets DRAFT School, Studying and Smarts 4 us estimate how often each of over 10,000 words in our vocabulary occurs in feminine versus masculine contexts at different points in our time period. We use this to track changes in stereotypes that prior work has linked to gender differences in contemporary academic outcomes. To preview, we find that the masculine associations of terms related to disobedience, aggressiveness, and other problematic classroom behaviors were already in place at the start of our time series in 1940, as were the feminine associations for terms for positive social and behavioral skills. We note that these two sets of keywords are closely related to the core stereotypes of women as communal and men as forcefully agentic, which theoretical accounts of the gender system expect to be highly resistant to change (Ridgeway 2011; Ridgeway and Correll 2004). And indeed, we observe that both sets of associations have remained substantively unchanged to the present day. Terms for school and studying followed a different trajectory. Because women’s relative educational attainment increased drastically throughout the 20th century, theoretical accounts suggest that these stereotypes should also have shifted (Eagly 1987; Ridgeway 2011; Ridgeway et al. 2009). And indeed, we find that while neither school nor studying had significant gender associations in 1940, both gradually gained strong associations with femininity. In fact, out of the roughly 16,000 words in our vocabulary for both 1940 and 2000, “student” exhibited the 213th-largest shift towards femininity (top 1.5%). The feminine associations of schooling frequently observed in contemporary sociological work may thus be a relatively recent phenomenon. Our most interesting result concerns the stereotypes of intelligence, which did not have a significant gender association in 1940. Throughout the 20th century, the gender associations of intelligence moved in nearly perfect counterpoint to the associations of school and studying, with DRAFT School, Studying and Smarts 5 intelligence becoming significantly associated with masculinity just as school and studying became associated with femininity. Indeed, in the year 2000, we find that “genius” is in the top 0.6% of most masculine terms in our vocabulary—roughly the same as the terms “marines”, “football”, and “brother”, and roughly as masculine as the terms “motherhood” and “fragrance” are feminine. In the Discussion, we propose that the striking synchrony between the trend lines for studying and intelligence (cor = -0.93), and the conspicuous timing of the change, may suggest that both stereotypes emerged as part of one cultural transformation where women’s increasing educational achievements became reframed as a product of effort, whereas men’s were reframed as consequences of effortless intelligence—a substantially higher-status avenue to success. Taken together, our observations thus appear broadly consistent with the theoretical