In reality, Wilkie and Bodenhausen were studying how participants subconsciously reacted to the numbers themselves. Alongside each name, on a random basis, was either a “1” or a “2”, which they were told was merely there to aid the researchers’ organization. In the first experiment, English-speaking participants were asked to judge the masculinity or femininity of either Bulgarian or Spanish names with which participants were unlikely to be familiar. Instead, they were told they would be judging the masculinity or femininity of various ambiguous items, like foreign names or pictures of the faces of babies. In each experiment, none of the participants knew the goal of the study was to evaluate a possible link between gender and number parity. Wilkie and Bodenhausen recruited participants online for a series of experiments that probed the idea of gendered numbers. So we thought, let’s test this out and see if that’s the case.”

“They have the same sort of idea that odd numbers belong in the male category, the yang category, and even numbers fitting in the yin category. “The Eastern tradition of yin and yang-those are also sort of fundamentally male and female ideas,” he adds. Odd numbers were considered male and even numbers were considered female.” “There were all these things that were considered female in that philosophical system and all these things were considered male. Everything falls into one of two categories,” Bodenhausen says. “Western cultures in the Pythagorean school-they have the sort of dichotomous view of reality. A little more digging revealed that the phenomenon of people assigning gender to numbers dates back to ancient Greece and China. He and Bodenhausen did a bit of searching on the Internet, which revealed a pile of anecdotes supporting his idea. It all started when Wilkie was struck with the notion that numbers could have a gender. Even numbers are feminine odd numbers are masculine.

Bodenhausen, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and Wilkie, an assistant professor at Notre Dame, discovered that we subconsciously assign genders to numbers. Wilkie, the meanings people ascribe to numbers can reveal much about our psychological biases, the way we learned math, and even how our brains cope with abstract concepts.

Do all odd numbers have an e in it