Open Access

Diego Dametto, Luc Vieira, Tania Noël, Tobias Schröder, Crisitina Aelenei, Christophe Blaison

• This paper compares the affective meanings attributed to feminine and masculine versions of the same social categories. We collected semantic differential ratings for 192 pairs of masculine and feminine social categories from two representative samples of n = 700 French and n = 700 German participants. We investigated how lexical and grammatical gender influences the affective meaning of social categories on Osgood’s dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity, as well as how differences in affective meaning are related to known gender stereotypes. Our results suggest that gender does produce only small effects. However, they are not randomly distributed and consistent with well-known gender stereotypes. The results enrich social psychological research on gender as well as the cultural debate on the use of gender-fair language in grammatically gendered languages by providing a more nuanced assessment of the affective roots of gender stereotypes conveyed by language.