Woman Up!: Vertical Metaphors for Gender in Chinese Bai Practitioners of Azhaliism

Previous research has shown that people tend to associate higher vertical spatial positions with male and lower positions with female. In this study, we document an understudied vertical representation of gender within Azhaliism, a Vajrayana Buddhist lineage practiced by the Bai people in southwestern China. In Study 1, we found that while Bai Taoists exhibited the conventional "men is up" metaphor in an explicit gender-verticality association test, Bai Azhaliists responded with "female is up." In Study 2, Bai Taoists implicitly encoded male faces faster when presented in a high (vs. low) vertical position, whereas Bai Azhaliists showed the opposite pattern, with the "female is up" metaphorical congruency effect standing in stark contrast to many other metaphorical mappings documented to date. These findings are consistent with the view in Azhaliism that sky beings are often female and earth beings are male. We also ruled out an alternative explanation based on power or valence differences between men and women; ratings of power and valence did not differ significantly as a function of target gender among Bai Azhaliists. Taken together, these results suggest that religious practice shapes cultural variation in the metaphorical representation of gender.