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We investigated the construction of gender in chat groups. Four unacquainted persons chatted in two gender-anonymous conditions and a non-anonymous control condition. In one anonymous condition, the gender focus was made salient. The other groups did not know about the gender focus. All participants had to guess the gender of the others and give reasons for their decisions. Results suggest that (a) overall, 2/3 of gender guesses fit the sex category of the targets, (b) gender anonymity was more comfortable for women, (c) participants used mostly gender-stereotypic cues to infer gender, however, men and women used syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues (with different predictive value) to different degrees, (d) conversational behavior varied depending on gender anonymity, and (e) degree of gender salience was irrelevant for the use of gender as an organizing category.

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We investigated the semantic connotations of the concepts woman, man, leadership, manager and businesswoman (N ¼ 101) on 25-item semantic differentials. Our study was a replication of Kruse and Wintermantel (1986), who had found that the concepts man, leadership and manager formed one cluster, whereas businesswoman and woman each remained separate (woman being particularly far off the main cluster). The authors concluded that leadership was still male. We were now interested in the changes in semantic connotations of those concepts over the last 20 years. In addition to influence of participants' sex, we were also interested in how professionals differed from students in their representations of these concepts. Results suggest that (a) clusters have changed, with manager, leadership and businesswoman now forming the main cluster, and (b) influence of professional status was more pronounced than influence of participants' sex. The observed changes in concepts lead us to the carefully optimistic statement that societal gender roles seem to be changing in the direction of more representational and also more factual gender equality.Résumé. Sur un différentiel sémantique de 25 termes les auteurs ont étudié les connotations sémantiques des concepts femme, homme, leadership, manager et