People think women are morally superior to men

Decades of scholarship on gender have shown that women are judged to be more caring and more communal than men. Here we use multiple methods (N = 5,376) to test an intriguing claim entailed by this work: People think that women are morally superior to men. Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face. Next, using a novel profile-generation task, we find that people are more likely to ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they are spontaneously thinking of a woman (vs. a man) and when they are assigned to do so. Further, using a large database of 1,864 normed behaviors, we find that behaviors associated with moral goodness are also stereotyped as feminine. Finally, we use a novel impression updating task to explore a potential consequence of this phenomenon. Specifically, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men. As a result, equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men. In sum, these findings reveal that moral goodness is closely linked to gender concepts: people think women are morally superior to men.