Men and women are often presented as two parallel sub-categories of the concept of people—e.g., “ladies and gentlemen,” “boys and girls,” and “men and women.” We find that, in practice, the concept people prioritizes men over women. Grounding this phenomenon in cognitive research on concepts and categories, we find evidence that people think of men as typical (prototypical) people while thinking of women at a lower level of categorization in terms of their gender category as women. We find this bias both in individual concepts and in collective concepts. In individual concepts, for instance, we find that people associate person concept words (e.g., people) with male names but associate female names with gender concepts (e.g., woman) more than the reverse. Using NLP tools we have also investigated this topic in collective concepts—widely shared, self-perpetuating societal beliefs. Based on billions of words on the internet, we find that words for person (e.g., people) overlap more with men whereas words for gender categories (e.g., woman) overlap more with women. Highlighting  why this matters, this tendency to emphasize gender about women crops up in well-intentioned equity initiatives often targeted at girls and women in majority-male occupations. Examples of this gender emphasis include “coding camps for girls” and “Space4women” (emphasis added). In a final set of experiments, we find that such well-intentioned gendered messaging backfires among children and adults, inadvertently reinforcing the idea that girls/women are atypical and unskilled in the occupation.