Gender as Embedded Social Cognition

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines gender as a cultural construct enacted through social cognitive processes that are embedded within the self, social interactions, and societal institutions. The embeddedness perspective elaborates how the binary gender categorization can create real gendered outcomes and experiences even in the absence of biologically essential gender differences. These categories take on a reality outside the mind of perceivers because the meanings attached to gender categories are shared by others in the culture, enacted in social interactions, internalized into self-views, and maintained by social systems. Societal institutions organize around gender, producing gendered norms, roles, and expectations; these expectations shape interpersonal interactions and individual-level decisions and experiences. These social and individual experiences can create confirmation of the gendered expectations of others. Gendered expectations and experiences become internalized into the self. The chapter examines implications of this perspective for social cognition, as well as malleability in gender cognitions and outcomes.