Heated societal debates in various countries concern the use of gender-fair language, meant to replace the generic use of grammatically masculine forms. Advocates and opponents of gender-fair language disagree on – among other things – the question of whether masculine forms leave women underrepresented in people's minds. We investigated the influence of linguistic form on the mental representations of gender in French. Participants read a short text about a professional gathering and estimated the percentages of men and women present at the gathering. Results showed higher estimates of the percentage of women in response to two gender-fair forms relative to the masculine form. Comparisons with normed data on people's perception of real-world gender ratios additionally showed that the gender-fair forms removed or reduced a male bias for neutral- and female-stereotyped professions, respectively, yet induced a female bias for male-stereotyped professions. Thus, gender-fair language increases the prominence of women in the mind, but has varying effects on consistency, i.e., the match with default perceptions of real-world gender ratios.

Heated societal debates in various countries concern the use of gender-fair language, meant to replace the generic use of grammatically masculine forms. Advocates and opponents of gender-fair language disagree on – among other things – the question of whether masculine forms leave women underrepresented in people’s minds. We investigated the influence of linguistic form on the mental representations of gender in French. Participants read a short text about a professional gathering and estimated the percentages of men and women present at the gathering. Results showed higher estimates of the percentage of women in response to two gender-fair forms relative to the masculine form. Comparisons with normed data on people’s perception of real-world gender ratios additionally showed that the gender-fair forms removed or reduced a male bias for neutral- and female-stereotyped professions, respectively, yet induced a female bias for male-stereotyped professions. Thus, gender-fair language increases the prominence of women in the mind, but has varying effects on consistency, i.e., the match with default perceptions of real-world gender ratios.

In a context of increasing expectations of gender equality in Western societies, exploring what may modulate people’s trust in evidence of gender discrimination against women is crucial to the deployment of corrective policies. Here, we explore one potentially powerful source of variation in how people evaluate such evidence: their level of moral commitment to gender equality. Across six experiments (N = 2861), we focus on perceptions of scientific reports of discriminatory hiring practices in academic settings. We find that people more morally committed to gender equality are more likely to trust experimental evidence of gender discrimination against women. This relationship cannot be explained by participants’ prior beliefs about the likelihood of gender bias in hiring practices in academia. Moreover, contrary to previous findings, women do not trust those results more than men. However, in addition to finding that moralization of gender equality is associated with greater trust in strong evidence of hiring bias against women, we find that it also predicts a higher likelihood of fallaciously inferring discrimination against women from contradictory evidence. These results paint a new picture of the origins of systematic differences in people’s appreciation of scientific evidence—strong but also weak—of gender bias in hiring, and show that issue moralization yields both costs and benefits in the public consumption of science.