The women-are-wonderful effect is the phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women when compared to men.
[1] The term was coined by researchers Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in a 1994 paper, where they had questioned the widely-held view that there was prejudice against women.
[2] In 1989, 203 psychology students of Purdue University were given questionnaires in groups of 20 and asked to assess subjects of both genders, which showed a more favourable attitude to women and female stereotypes.
They evaluated the social categories of men and women, relating the traits and expectations of each gender through interviews, emotion-associations and free-response measures.
Subjects at Purdue and Rutgers participated in computerized tasks that measured automatic attitudes based on how quickly a person categorizes pleasant and unpleasant attributes with each gender.
[5] Other experiments in this study found people showed automatic preference for their mothers over their fathers, or associated the male gender with violence or aggression.