A draft instrument for review. This page is a working mock-up: every task runs exactly as a participant would see it. Use the buttons on the right to read this overview, then try each section yourself.
This is a standalone study with two goals. First, it measures how gender-typed a range of cognitive and physical tasks are perceived to be: for each task, do people think men or women tend to do better, and in what proportion. Second, for a few of those tasks it measures actual performance and the gender gap in performance. Putting the two together lets us ask where perceptions of gender-typing match real performance differences and where they diverge.
The main ambition project uses incentivized search tasks (a word search and a number search) to study goal-setting and re-attempt behavior by gender. A natural question is whether those tasks, and related ones, are perceived as gender-typed, and whether any perceived typing lines up with actual performance gaps. Mental rotation is included as a task with a well-documented male advantage, and a number-grid counting task is included as a candidate that leaned slightly male in the synthetic data.
A participant moves through these sections:
We can randomize the order of these sections if we want.
This is the full set assembled for review. The ability-typed tasks (mental rotation, digit-symbol coding, verbal fluency, finger tapping) give real performance gaps on both the male and female side to compare against perception; a real run would trim to about four or five tasks to fit the time.
Use the buttons on the right to run the performance tasks and the perception module exactly as a participant will see them. Each task runs live with its real timer and scoring, and the panel on the right shows the data the survey records. Reload the page to start a section over.
The buttons cover the two hands-on parts of the survey. The remaining sections in the list above (consent, the AI-free pledge, the checks, demographics, and the debrief) are standard survey pages.
Whether a task is seen as more suited to men or to women has two roots in the research literature. One is about traits: tasks that call for assertive, competitive, achievement-oriented behavior read as masculine, and tasks that call for warmth, nurturing, and social sensitivity read as feminine (Heilman 2012; Eagly and Karau 2002). The other is about measured ability: on average men score higher on spatial and mechanical tasks, women score higher on verbal fluency, perceptual speed, and reading emotions, and most of these differences are small (Hyde 2005; Miller and Halpern 2014). People's beliefs about who performs better track these real differences closely and tend to exaggerate them (Bordalo et al. 2019).
Table 1 places the broad domains on that spectrum, drawing on major works in the literature, only some of which are experimental tasks. Table 2 turns to the specific tasks that experiments have actually used, with how each has been typed and a source for every claim, and notes which paradigms are used most.
| Domain | Typed toward | Basis | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leadership, competition, assertiveness (agentic) | Male | Trait stereotype | Heilman 2012; Eagly and Karau 2002 |
| Physical strength, heavy lifting | Male | Physical, agentic | extreme anchor (Heilman 2012) |
| Spatial ability, mental rotation | Male | Measured ability (largest gap) | Voyer et al. 1995; Linn and Petersen 1985 |
| Reaction time, finger tapping | Male | Measured motor speed | Roivainen 2011 |
| Mathematics | Perceived male; actual gap near zero | Perception vs. ability | Bordalo et al. 2019 (perceived); Hyde et al. 1990, Lindberg et al. 2010 (actual) |
| Verbal ability, fluency, memory | Female | Measured ability | Hyde and Linn 1988; Hirnstein et al. 2022 |
| Perceptual speed, coding and clerical | Female | Measured ability | Roivainen 2011; Feingold 1988 |
| Emotion recognition, social sensitivity | Female | Measured ability and trait | McClure 2000; Hall 1978 |
| Nurturing, caregiving, supportiveness (communal) | Female | Trait stereotype | Heilman 2012; Eagly and Karau 2002 |
| Fine motor dexterity | Female | Measured ability | Nicholson and Kimura 1996 |
Most gender differences are small overall (Hyde 2005), and perceived task typing has weakened over time (Cejka and Eagly 1999; Beggs and Doolittle 1993). Tasks can also be rated directly on a masculine-to-feminine scale (Shinar 1975).
| Task | Perceived as | Who actually performs better | Evidence (quoted from the source) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mental rotation | — | Men, by a wide margin | The largest spatial sex difference, favoring men (meta-analysis of 286 effect sizes, Voyer, Voyer and Bryden 1995) |
| Raven's pattern matrices | — | Men, slightly (adults) | "males obtained a higher mean than females by between .22d and .33d" (Irwing and Lynn 2005) |
| Reaction time and finger tapping | — | Men (faster) | "males are faster on reaction time tests and finger tapping" (Roivainen 2011) |
| Mazes (spatial navigation) | Male | About equal at baseline; men pull ahead under competition | "the average performance of men was 11.2 mazes, whereas it was 9.7 for women" (Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini 2003, in Niederle and Vesterlund 2011) |
| Adding two-digit numbers | Male (math stereotype) | No gap; women slightly better at computation | "there are no gender differences in ability on easy math tests" (Niederle and Vesterlund 2007); "women are significantly better at the math task" (Kamas and Preston, in Niederle and Vesterlund 2011) |
| Ball-into-bucket (physical, field) | — | Depends on culture | "the gender gap in tournament entry reverses in the matrilineal society" (Gneezy, Leonard and List 2009, in Niederle and Vesterlund 2011) |
| Counting numbers in a grid | — | Not reported | Used as a tedious, skill-neutral effort task; no gender difference reported (Abeler et al. 2011) |
| Word/number encryption (decoding) | — | Not reported | Skill-neutral real-effort task; no gender analysis reported (Erkal et al. 2011) |
| Slider task | — | Neutral by design | "does not require or test pre-existing knowledge ... identical across repetitions" (Gill and Prowse 2012) |
| Number-string / ZIP-code search | — | Mixed (paradigm-dependent) | Women lead on perceptual speed (Roivainen 2011); men lead on visual search (Stoet 2011) |
| Stroop (color-word) task | — | Women, slightly | "women outperform men in the classic Stroop task" (d = 0.12) (Sjoberg et al. 2022) |
| Digit-symbol coding | — | Women (perceptual speed) | "females outperform males on ... the Coding and Symbol Search subtests" of the WAIS (Roivainen, Suokas and Saari 2021) |
| Word search and anagrams | Female | Women equal or slightly better | "everyone believes that men are better at the math task and women at the word task. In actuality, women are significantly better at the math task and are slightly but not significantly better at the word task" (Kamas and Preston, in Niederle and Vesterlund 2011) |
| Verbal generation (fluency) | Female | No gap; women predicted better | "In the verbal task, however, there are no gender differences in performance under either incentive scheme" (Shurchkov 2012, in Niederle and Vesterlund 2011); phonemic fluency favors women (Hirnstein et al. 2022) |
The pattern to notice across the two middle columns: tasks perceived as male often show no real performance gap. Adding numbers is seen as male yet has no ability gap (women are, if anything, better at computation). The gap that does appear on that task is in willingness to compete, which is largest for the adding-numbers task and negligible for verbal and field tasks (Markowsky and Beblo 2022).