 Generic statements are ones such as “cats are furry”, or “a cat has fur”, which are neither universal generalizations (there are furless cats) nor existential generalization (the claim being made is clearly stronger). They give rise to many puzzles, which have for some time interested both linguists and philosophers. For a fuller discussion of generics, see  the entry on generics.  Our focus here is the social and political import that has recently been suggested for generic statements about social groups, on which there is a growing literature. This literature takes as its starting point Sarah-Jane Leslie’s work (Leslie 2015; Wodak, Leslie, and Rhodes 2015). Of key interest here are examples such as “boys don’t cry” or “women place their families before their careers”. These sentences can be used to express merely descriptive claims—describing, for example, crying as something not that many boys do. But they can also be used to make normative claims about what boys or women should do. Wodak, Leslie, and Rhodes (2015) suggest that “we can understand the difference between normative and descriptive generics in terms of the different concepts picked out by the noun phrase in the generics themselves” (Wodak et. al. 2015: 629). ‘Woman’ may pick out a normative concept—an ideal, which might include such things as a focus on family over career; or, alternatively, it may pick out a descriptive concept, and refer to women regardless of whether they focus on family over career. Leslie uses this as a foundation for explaining utterances like “Hillary Clinton is the only man in the Obama White House”, suggesting that ‘man’ here refers to the ideal of manliness. It is also a part of a more general project of arguing that generic utterances have harmful effects on social cognition. Leslie (forthcoming) also discusses what she calls “striking property generics”, statements that attribute dangerous properties to groups generically specified—like “black people are dangerous” or “Muslims are terrorists”. She argues that striking property generic claims may not require many instances to be accepted as true (assuming some other conditions are also met) allowing them to serve as a key mechanism in perpetuating and exacerbating prejudice. (For some criticisms of Leslie on striking property generics, see Saul forthcoming and Sterken 2015a,b.)