Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it?

Download

10.1098:rstb.2017.0126.pdf

Date

2018-08-05

Author

Semin, Gun R.
Palma, Tomas
Acartürk, Cengiz
Dziuba, Aleksandra

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

207
views

145
downloads

Based on research in physical anthropology, we argue that brightness marks the abstract category of gender, with light colours marking the female gender and dark colours marking the male gender. In a set of three experiments, we examine this hypothesis, first in a speeded gender classification experiment with male and female names presented in black and white. As expected, male names in black and female names in white are classified faster than the reverse gender-colour combinations. The second experiment relies on a gender classification task involving the disambiguation of very briefly appearing non-descript stimuli in the form of black and white 'blobs'. The former are classified predominantly as male and the latter as female names. Finally, the processes driving light and dark object choices for males and females are examined by tracking the number of fixations and their duration in an eye-tracking experiment. The results reveal that when choosing for a male target, participants look longer and make more fixations on dark objects, and the same for light objects when choosing for a female target. The implications of these findings, which repeatedly reveal the same data patterns across experiments with Dutch, Portuguese and Turkish samples for the abstract category of gender, are discussed. The discussion attempts to enlarge the subject beyond mainstream models of embodied grounding.

Subject Keywords

Grounding gender, Colour and gender categorization, Eye tracking, Disambiguating amorphous stimuli

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/30588

Journal

PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2017.0126

Collections

Graduate School of Informatics, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Gender discourse and public space: socio-spatial construction of gender in the city, the case of Rize, Turkey Vanlıoğlu Yazıcı, Nagehan; Basa, İnci; Department of Architecture (2019) This study focuses on gender in everyday life and locates itself theoretically at the intersecting fields of space and gender theories. Regarding Lefebvre’s claim that “(social) space, is a (social) product”, it is possible to state that space is formed by the social relationships and routines of everyday life. Within this understanding, the thesis aims to investigate the discursive relationship between gender and space. In order to outline a theoretical framework, it employs the pioneering works in both ge...
Gender role orientation of athletes and nonathletes in a patriarchal society: A study in Turkey Koca, C; Asci, FH; Kirazcı, Sadettin (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2005-02-01) The purpose of this study was to compare the gender role orientation and gender role classification of female and male athletes to those of their nonathlete counterparts. A total of 463 athletes and 378 nonathletes completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The findings indicated that athletes score higher on the masculinity and femininity subscales than do nonathletes. Men had higher scores on masculinity than did women, whereas women had higher scores on femininity than did men. In addition, both men and women...
Gender roles and women’s status in central asia and anatolia between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries Dalkesen, Nilgün; Togan, İsenbike; Department of History (2007) This study examines changing gender roles and women’s status under the light of töre/yasa and sharī‘a among the Inner Asian Turkic and Mongolian societies and Ottomans in Anatolia especially between the thirteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. In this frame, this study traces gender roles and women’s status in Inner Asia before the influence of Islamic culture and civilizations by using oral and written sources as well as anthropological studies. It also focuses on the formation of töre and...
Gender on Self-Definitions in Work-Related and Relational Contexts: Are Women and Men Different or Similar? Küçükkömürler, Sanem; Baltacı, Sinem (2017-11-10) Beliefs and expectations about gender differences have been existed throughout the history. In these beliefs and expectations, the basic assumption was that "women and men are different". Studies in the literature showed that within-group differences are greater than between-group differences for gender-related issues [1]. However beliefs and expectations about gender differences still lead people to express gender schema-consistent manifestations. Therefore different gender related beliefs about self may l...
Face identification, gender and age groups classifications for semantic annotation videos Yaprakkaya, Gökhan; Çiçekli, Fehime Nihan; Department of Computer Engineering (2010) This thesis presents a robust face recognition method and a combination of methods for gender identification and age group classification for semantic annotation of videos. Local binary pattern histogram which has 256 bins and pixel intensity differences are used as extracted facial features for gender classification. DCT Mod2 features and edge detection results around facial landmarks are used as extracted facial features for age group classification. In gender classification module, a Random Trees classif...

Citation Formats

G. R. Semin, T. Palma, C. Acartürk, and A. Dziuba, “Gender is not simply a matter of black and white, or is it?,” PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES, pp. 0–0, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/30588.