ABSTRACT
Every person can be categorized in multiple ways. The same Singaporean person, for example, can also be categorized as Buddhist, Chinese, doctor, rich, and woman. Among such multiple social categorizations, gender is the first to be acquired by children around two years of age (see, e.g., Ruble & Martin, 1998, for a review and discussion), and it is the only social category that divides the world into nearly equal halves (United Nations, 2001). Given this apparently high level of social significance, one might reasonably ask the question as to whether gender, in relation to all other categories, might have some special status in terms of how it is represented and used in social judgment. In this chapter, we present findings from a program of work that has attempted to provide some definitive answers to this question.
