Numerical Gender Association In Junior High School Students

Numbers are a cognitive tool that can give vivid metaphorical meaning to language.Numbers are not only a counting tool,but also contain some subjective perceptions of the objective world.Therefore,this study attempts to investigate whether numbers have gendered connotations in the Chinese cultural context.The study uses junior high school students in different grades as experimental subjects,and adopts the method of external direct test and implicit association test to explore the association patterns between numbers and gender,and analyzes the influence of the subjects’ age,gender,whether they are only children,and different forms of numbers on the gender connotations of numbers,so as to gain insight into junior high school students’ overall trends in gender perceptions of middle school students.This study bridges the gaps in previous numerical research and provides a more direct theoretical basis for the study of abstract conceptual gender experiments,while discovering patterns and differences in junior high school students’ gender cognition.The results of the study found that the number "1" was rated significantly higher than the number "2" in Experiment 1,meaning that subjects were more likely to rate the number "1" as male than the number "2".Experiment 2 changed the numbers to odd(1,3,5,7,9)and even(2,4,6,8),Odd and even numbers occur with equal frequency.The results of Experiment 2 were similar to those of Experiment 1,and the findings revealed that the ratings for odd numbers were significantly higher than those for even numbers,i.e.,subjects preferred to rate odd numbers as male compared to even numbers.In Experiments 3 and 4 we changed the numbers to English numbers,and all other experimental procedures were similar to Experiments 1 and 2.The study also found similar results to Experiments 3 and 4,i.e.,subjects tended to rate odd numbers as more masculine than even numbers,i.e.,there was such a gender association of numbers: odd-masculine and even-feminine.Moreover,a similar number-gender association was found when the numbers were paired with other materials and an implicit rating of the gender of the numbers was performed.Based on the results of the study,the following conclusions were drawn: Chinese junior high school students have numerical gender associations,i.e.,they tend to associate odd numbers as males and even numbers as females;junior high school students’ numerical gender associations can be more consistently present in the episodic test,but are influenced by the associative material in the implicit association test;Numbers of junior high school students Gender association is affected by gender and age in some experimental conditions,but not by whether or not one is an only child.