Justice, liberty, democracy and victory have something in common in many languages: in grammar, they tend to be feminine. A new set of studies finds abstract nouns carry feminine gender more often than other nouns in seven of nine Indo-European languages, and that people also picture these ideas as women.
The research was led by Carmen Cervone of the University of Padua, with Ilaria Motta, Andrea Scatolon, Valentina Cimmino Picone and Anne Maass, who is also at New York University Abu Dhabi. It was published online in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology on November 7, 2025.
From dictionaries to implicit bias tests
Research on grammatical gender usually highlights its costs for women, such as the generic masculine making women less visible. The authors set out to test a different link: that abstract concepts, which they call arguably the most sophisticated products of human thought, are associated with femininity.
Two archival studies counted noun genders and found the feminine more frequent among abstract nouns in seven of the nine languages examined. In two further studies, people imagined feminine abstract nouns as female, both when asked directly and in a task where they assigned voices to the words.
Two Implicit Association Tests then showed that abstract concepts are linked with women as a social category, not just with the grammar of particular words.
A link to the idea of women as superhuman
The authors say the results show a connection between abstractness and grammatical gender that carries psychological weight through the gender congruency effect, the tendency to think of objects in line with their grammatical gender.
In their final study they also tied abstractness to super-human imagery. They suggest these cognitive processes may feed the idealisation of women as “super-human.”
The team has posted its data, study materials and supplements on the Open Science Framework.
Study Details:
- Title: Liberty, Justice, and Victory: Abstract Nouns are Grammatically and Psychologically Feminine
- Authors: Carmen Cervone, Ilaria Motta, Andrea Scatolon, Valentina Cimmino Picone, Anne Maass
- Journal: Journal of Language and Social Psychology
- Publication Date: November 7, 2025
- DOI: 10.1177/0261927X251392718