Same Script, Different Decade: The Gender Stereotype Freeze Frame

Elizabeth L. Haines. Ph.D., William Paterson University

Over the past forty years, women have made remarkable gains in politics, sports, higher education, leadership, and the workplace. Yet, despite this progress, gender stereotypes still depict women and men as fundamentally—and inaccurately—different. Drawing on data from 1983, 2014, and 2024, I show that perceptions of gender differences in agency and communion remain strikingly strong (Cohen’s d = 0.9–1.8), even as actual behavioral and occupational gaps have narrowed (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016; Haines & Lofaro, in prep).

I argue that the barriers to gender equality are not simply “in the stereotypes” but arise from the intersection of individual, relational, and structural forces in both work and home contexts. To illuminate these dynamics, I introduce the Role Prioritization Model (Haines & Stroessner, 2019), which builds on role congruity, lack of fit, and backlash theories (Eagly & Karau, 2002; Heilman, 2001; Rudman & Glick, 2001) to specify when and how prescriptive and proscriptive norms limit both women and men.