Women Versus Females: Gender Essentialism in Everyday Language.

How do different words referring to gender/sex categories reflect and/or shape our understanding of gender/sex concepts? The current study examined this issue by assessing how individuals use gender/sex terms (females, males, women, men). Participants recruited through MTurk (N = 299) completed an online survey, rating the terms on nine dimensions, completing a fill-in-the-blank task, and reporting gender essentialist beliefs. Overall, participants rated the words females/males as more biological and technical, and women/men as higher on all other dimensions (e.g., appropriate, polite, warm). Preference for females/males correlated positively with gender essentialism among women. These findings suggest that use of certain gendered terms is linked to how people conceptualize gender/sex. Future research should further explore the relation between choice of gendered terms, how language choice reflects and shapes attitudes and beliefs about gender/sex, and factors (e.g., race) that may influence this relation.