277 students wrote descriptions of hypothetical persons based on a set of four adjectives. The set of 4 adjectives consisted of one of the following: 4 masculine traits, 4 neutral traits, 2 masculine/2 feminine traits, and 4 feminine traits. Comparisons were made of the description based on these adjectives as to whether the hypothetical person described was male or female. Most of the descriptions were male with the proportion of males decreasing according to the number of female traits included in the adjective list. This was true even for the list made up of all female traits.
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