In general, people tend to associate men with work-related concepts and women with
home-related concepts. In this study, we examined whether these beliefs about sex-
roles that people had implicitly and also explicitly were influenced by remembering
exemplars of homemakers (i.e., traditional women) or career women (i.e., nontradi-
tional women). Participants were asked to remember as many exemplars of traditional
or nontraditional women as they could and write down their names. Following this
manipulation, they completed the paper-and-pencil IAT measuring their implicit asso-
ciations between gender and concepts related to work and home. They then completed
a measure of explicit belief about sex-roles. The results showed that participants who
remembered exemplars of nontraditional women revealed weaker implicit male-work
and female-home associations than participants who remembered exemplars of tradi-
tional women. On the other hand, the explicit belief about sex-roles was not influenced
by the type of the remembered women exemplars. These results suggested that the
belief that people have implicitly about sex-roles might depend on the type of women
exemplars activated in situation. Finally, we discussed possible processes of the change
in implicit belief about sex-roles.
