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Can a Scientist Be a Young, Attractive Woman? The Stereotype of a Scientist and the Lexical Choices of Women and Men

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Abstract

The question of the conformance of a researcher’s features to the stereotype of a scientist is rarely addressed in the context of scientific research. We decided to examine its significance in two experiments involving women and men in which the persons conducting the experiment had features respectively conforming and not conforming to the stereotype of a scientist. Both experiments were carried out on an interactive model and the dependent variables were length of utterance and lexical choices. We chose to use linguistic material because, as classical research shows, it is particularly susceptible to the influence of social context and features of the interlocutor. To operationalise the dependent variable, we used Ertel’s Speech Style Quotients. The results of both experiments were found to be significant for context comparisons but non-significant for gender, which confirms the importance of features of the interlocutor in determining utterance length and lexical choices.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at https:/osf.io, reference number zj79s.

Notes

  1. The number of participants in the second experiment is given in parentheses.

  2. All of the competent judges involved in constructing the method and the research tools were post-doctoral research staff of Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.

  3. A detailed description of the Polish adaptation of the quotients can be found in Obrębska (2013).

  4. The results on differences in utterance length for the first experiment were published by Obrębska and Kleka (2016a).

  5. The results on lexical choices for the first experiment were published by Obrębska and Kleka (2016b).

  6. Because the results for AQ in the first experiment did not satisfy normality assumptions, the ANOVA result was confirmed by a non-parametric Kruksal–Wallis test (chi2(5) = 15.8, p = .007).

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  1. Faculty of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Adam Mickiewicz University, ul. Szamarzewskiego 89, 60-568, Poznań, Poland

    Monika Obrębska, Paweł Kleka & Romana Knoll

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  1. Monika Obrębska
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  2. Paweł Kleka
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Correspondence to Monika Obrębska.

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Obrębska, M., Kleka, P. & Knoll, R. Can a Scientist Be a Young, Attractive Woman? The Stereotype of a Scientist and the Lexical Choices of Women and Men. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 577–595 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09870-y

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