A lay theory concerning to the nature of human groups is psychological essentialism, which is presented as the tendency to believe that the members of a group have an underlying essence or nature that renders their identity. Psychological essentialism relies on causal determinisms to explain the differences between members of social categories and groups. In order to identify the presence of essentialist beliefs about gender in the discourse of Colombian men and women, a content analysis of four focus groups was carried out, two of which included male participants and the other two were female, while discussing about the possible social implications of being a woman in Colombia. Information was registered in audio and the qualitative analysis was performed with the help of the software Atlas-Ti, version 7.0. The initial coding process was informed by literature on the subject, generating guiding categories. Afterwards, emerging categories were identified, and a comparison of the information of the two (theoretical and empirical) types of categories was performed, to finally think about the essentialist thinking and gender discrimination focused on women. It was identified that both men and women, appealed to essentialist explanations, cultural, social and biological, to explain and justify social inequalities in power between groups, showing that there is a hierarchy where the woman sits on disadvantage. However, some non-essentialist ideas about the perception of social change in the status of women were identified as well, revolving around changes identified in the access to different spaces and roles.
