-based stereotypes about American women have evolved in some positive ways regarding "competence and " since 1946, according to a meta-analysis of public opinion polls spanning eight decades. However, the polling data showed that 21st-century women residing in the United States are still viewed as less "ambitious and courageous" than men.

This analysis, "Gender Stereotypes Have Changed: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of U.S. Public Opinion Polls From 1946 to 2018," was published online today in the journal American Psychologist.

Source: J. Howard Miller - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (Public Domain)

For this analysis, lead author Alice Eagly of Northwestern University and colleagues combed through massive amounts of data involving 30,093 adult respondents to 16 different opinion polls conducted over 73 years.

The team focused on polls that asked specific questions regarding the distribution of character traits between the sexes. (e.g., "In general, do you think each of the following characteristics is more true of women or men, or equally true of both?") Eagly's coauthors were Christa Nater, Michéle Kaufmann, and Sabine Sczesny from the University of Bern and David I. Miller from the American Institutes for Research.

This meta-analysis addresses two main questions: As women's roles changed considerably between the 1940s and the 2010s, how have gender stereotypes changed? And did respondent demographic variables moderate the changes over time?

The analysis cataloged information from opinion polls under three umbrella terms: communion (e.g., affectionate, emotional), agency (e.g., ambitious, courageous), and competence (e..g., intelligent, creative).

The most dramatic change in gender stereotypes over the past eight decades related to characteristics in the competence domain. As the authors explain, "Of most interest is the analysis on competence, which showed a significant increase over time in the percentage answering equal. The responses indicating that either is more competent than the other declined, but choosing men declined more sharply than did choosing women."

As a specific competence-related example, a poll from 1946 found that only 35 percent of those surveyed thought women and men were equally intelligent; among the 65 percent who believed there were gender-based intelligence differences, most thought men were "smarter."

On the flip side, a 2018 poll found that 86 percent of those surveyed thought women and men were equally intelligent. Among 21st-century survey respondents, 9 percent said that women were more intelligent, while only 5 percent thought men were more intelligent.

Another finding from this meta-analysis shows that perceptions of women as being more "compassionate and affectionate" than men have become more robust since 1946.

However, according to this analysis, there hasn’t been any statistically significant change in perceptions of women within the stereotype domain of "agency," which includes traits associated with being ambitious, courageous, decisive, and staying calm during emergencies.

"Challenging traditional claims that stereotypes of women and men are fixed or rigid, our study joins others in finding stereotypes to be flexible to changes in social roles," Eagly said, according to a press release. "As the roles of women and men have changed since the mid-20th century, so have beliefs about their attributes."

Eagly speculates that the uptick in stereotypical perceptions of women as being more "competent" over the past eight decades may stem from the increased role of women in the labor force. In 1950, only 32 percent of women were part of the labor force; this number increased to 57 percent by 2018.

Conversely, men's overall slice of the "labor force pie" declined from 82 to 69 percent during the same period (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Additionally, unlike the academic status quo in the mid-20th century, women currently earn more bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees than men (Okahana & Zhou, 2018). Taken together, there are some who believe these trends are leading to what The Red Pill filmmaker Cassie Jaye and fellow PT blogger Marty Nemko call "Dispirited Men."

Alice Eagly and coauthors conclude, "In sum, U.S. poll data show that it is only in competence that gender equality has come to dominate people’s thinking about women and men. For qualities of , the past 73 years have produced an accentuated stereotype of women as the more communal sex, with men retaining their agency advantage."