Gender differences in remembering about things to do depend on partnership status

Prospective memory, which is the ability to remember to do something in the future, is strongly linked to gender stereotypes. Women are expected to play a mnemonic role in romantic heterosexual couples and be successful in prospective memory tasks. Our purpose was to test whether stereotypical expectations manifest in gender differences in remembering to perform intended actions. Furthermore, we investigated whether these differences manifest only when participants are in a relationship with an other-gender partner which puts women under higher social pressure to be effective in prospective remembering. Forty Polish women (20 in relationship, 20 out of relationship) and 40 Polish men (18 in relationship, 22 out of relationship) were asked to send a SMS text to the experimenter every day for 7 consecutive days. As predicted, a female advantage in performance was found only for participants who were in a relationship, with no gender differences among those who were not. Of particular interest was that women who were in a relationship performed better compared to women without partners. In contrast, men performed worse if they were in a relationship compared to when they did not have a partner. Implications are discussed for how gender inequalities in prospective remembering can be tackled by educators in secondary schools and psychologists who conduct premarital workshops, as well as how they can be used by couple psychotherapists to deal with crises related to the division of labor in a couple.