Gender, Grammar, and Personification in the Marketplace: Understanding Stock Prices Through the Lens of Gender in a High-Stakes Setting

We examine the influence of grammatical gender on decision making in an arena where irrational linguistic biases should be ruthlessly rooted out: stock markets. In an archival analysis of 15 years of data from Spanish-speaking countries, stocks of companies with grammatically male names showed greater upward momentum than stocks of companies with grammatically female names. We also “replicated” this effect experimentally, showing that Spanish-speaking respondents predicted that grammatically male (vs. female) stocks that have gone up in the recent past will continue to go up. Experimental manipulations suggested this gendered upward-momentum effect was due to beliefs about men's greater forcefulness and rationality, as stock analysts’ criticisms about timidity and emotional decision-making were more likely to “stick” to grammatically female companies. Some mixed evidence also suggested that stocks of male (vs. female) companies were generally overvalued.