Using a U.S. census-matched sample of Democrats and Republicans (n = 826), the study experimentally varied whether a vignette’s gender cue appeared early as a noun (around the 3rd–4th word) or later as a pronoun (around the 10th word) while participants rated the wrongness of authority vs. justice violations. Republicans rated authority violations as worse when the actor was introduced as a “girl/woman” early rather than neutrally with gender revealed later, Democrats showed the opposite direction (harsher for “boy/man”), and there were no comparable effects for justice violations—critically, the stereotype effect could be removed by delaying gender information about 6–7 words, implying that small, timing-sensitive wording choices can meaningfully attenuate bias in surveys, media framing, and institutional judgment contexts.