Authors

• Luodemäki, Niina (Tampere University. Faculty of Social Sciences)

Keywords

attitudes, gender, gender role, occupations, prejudice

Abstract

This dataset contains aggregate data from an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measured the strength of associations between gender and occupation. The test examined the participants' reaction time in how quickly they sorted words into categories (N: 137). The occupation categories used in the test were lawyer/solicitor (lakimies/juristi) and actor (näyttelijä). The two terms for lawyer/solicitor differ in Finnish so that the term 'lakimies' is gendered (masculine) whereas the term 'juristi' is gender neutral. The Finnish term 'näyttelijä' for actor/actress is these days understood as gender-neutral, although a more old-fashioned form 'näyttelijätär' for actress also exists. The data were collected for a Master's thesis that studied whether the strength of implicit associations between gender and occupation was affected by the use of the gendered 'lakimies' term for lawyer/solicitor when compared to the gender-neutral term 'juristi'.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a reaction time based categorisation task where the participant is asked to quickly sort words and/or pictures into categories. In the test for this study, the participant was shown four categories: lawyer/solicitor (lakimies/juristi), actor (näyttelijä), male, and female. Additionally, 10 stimulus words were shown relating to each category. During the test, the participant was asked to sort the stimulus word that appeared on screen to the category they thought it belonged to, for example, lawyer - male or actor - female. Four versions of the test were conducted with differing test settings. Each version included stereotypically gendered (congruent) and non-stereotypically gendered (incongruent) categories. Each participant completed only one version of the test. In all versions, the participants completed seven categorisation tasks, of which the reaction times for tasks 4/7 and 7/7 were collected. In the practice tasks, 20 stimulus words were shown to the participants, whereas in the recorded tasks (4/7 and 7/7), 40 stimulus words were shown.

The data include the average reaction times of the respondents and their standard deviations in the four different test versions. Additionally, the average of all reaction times and their standard deviations, the difference in the reaction times of the congruent and incongruent categories, and an IAT score which details the strength of the association, are included in the data. The reaction time was calculated by subtracting the time shown on screen from the time the participant took to categorise the stimulus word by using the 'i' and 'e' keys on the keyboard.

Background variables included the participant's age, gender and level of education.