Moral Goodness is Gendered

Women are consistently judged to be more caring and communal than men. We find that moral goodness itself is feminine at the level of faces, traits, behaviors, and impressions (N = 5,376). Using reverse-correlation methods, we show that mental representations of the face of “a morally good person” is a woman’s face. When completing a novel profile-generation task, people ascribe more morally good traits to women than to men, both when they spontaneously think of a woman (vs. a man) and when assigned. Across 1,864 previously normed behaviors, we find that actions associated with moral goodness are stereotyped as feminine. Finally, in a novel impression updating task, we find that immoral behavior is more diagnostic for women than men; equivalent moral transgressions lead to larger negative character updating for women than for men. In sum, moral goodness is gendered: people think women are morally superior to men.