Liberty, Justice, and Victory: Abstract Nouns are Grammatically and Psychologically Feminine

Grammatical gender generally implies disadvantages for women (e.g., the generic masculine leading to real-life invisibility of women). Diverging from this idea, we here postulate that abstract concepts (such as “justice” or “democracy”), arguably reflecting the most sophisticated expression of human thought, are associated with femininity. Two archival studies (Study 1a, b) show the greater frequency of feminine gender among abstract nouns across seven (out of nine) Indo-European languages. Studies 2 and 4 show that feminine abstract nouns are envisaged as female, both explicitly and through a voice-assignment task. Furthermore, through Implicit Association Tests (IATs), we show that abstract concepts are associated with women as a social category (Studies 3a, b). Together, our studies show an association between abstractness and grammatical gender that carries psychological meaning through the gender congruency effect. Arguably, these cognitive processes may contribute to the idealization of women as “super-human,” through the association between abstractness and super-human imagery (Study 4).