Gender-linked differences in everyday memory performance

Recent research has demonstrated that people hold beliefs about how well others perform everyday memory tasks according to another's sex. For example, meta-memory ratings indicate that other men and other women are believed to differ in their success at performing certain memory tasks (Crawford, Herrmann, Holdsworth, Randall & Robbins, 1989). In the present study, two experiments investigated whether gender stereotypes concerning everyday memory have any validity. Experiment 1 presented female and male subjects with two tasks that the aforementioned meta-memory ratings had shown are implicitly gender marked: learning a shopping list (a sterotypically feminine task) and learning directions to go to a particular place (a stereotypically masculine task). The results were consistent with the gender stereotypes, i.e. women recalled more of the shopping list than men whereas men recalled more of the directions than women. The second experiment investigated whether memory performance would be influenced by mere changes in the label of materials in memory tasks to be biased toward male or female gender background: labelling a shopping list as pertaining to 'groceries' or to 'hardware store'; and a set of directions to 'make a shirt' or to 'make a workbench'. The results also indicated that memory performance varied in ways consistent with gender stereotypes.