School, Studying, and Smarts: Gender Stereotypes and Education Across 80 Years of American Print Media, 1930–2009.

This article examines how education-related gender stereotypes in American print media evolved from 1930 to 2009 as women's educational attainment surpassed men's. Using bootstrapped Word2Vec embeddings on a 200-million-word corpus, the study tracks six stereotypes linked to academic outcomes: schooling, school effort, socio-behavioral skills, problem behaviors, intelligence, and unintelligence. Findings show that stereotypes tied to core gender distinctions—women as communal and men as agentic (reflected in socio-behavioral skills and problem behaviors)—remained stable, while schooling and school effort became increasingly associated with femininity. Conversely, intelligence and unintelligence shifted toward masculine associations, suggesting a cultural reframing where men's academic success is linked to innate intelligence and women's to effort, potentially maintaining hierarchical gender distinctions despite social change. These results contribute to understanding the persistence and transformation of the gender system through cultural stereotypes over time.