Episode Details

April Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire, and she studies the psychology of androcentrism—people’s tendency to think of men as a stand-in for all people and treating women’s experiences as the outlier. We talk about exactly what androcentrism is, the kinds of evidence we have for it, and what it means for the future of how we think about gender.

Things that come up in this episode:

• The history of the genderless pronoun "thon," including a question in The Straight Dope (see Baron, 2018; Converse, 1884; Merriam-Webster)
• An overview of the psychology of androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2019)
• Androcentrism reflected in the order in which people are listed (Hegarty et al., 2011)
• Billions of words on the internet highlight everyday androcentrism (Bailey et al., 2022)

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