Masculinity
and Femininity
- Starting with common sense
- List 3 ways in which you are
masculine and three ways in which you are feminine
- Describe a masculine man and a
feminine man; similarly, describe a masculine woman and a feminine woman
- What do masculinity and femininity
comprise? -- personality traits, appearance,
nonverbal behaviors, dress, hobbies and interests, occupations, college
majors, sexuality, interpersonal relationships, biological traits?
- The essentialist versus social
constructionist debate as applied to masculinity and femininity
- Masculinity-femininity as a bipolar, unidimensional trait
- Terman and Miles's
(1936) Sex and Personality: describing the first MF scale
- The analogy between MF and
intelligence
- The bipolar, "either,
or" assumption about MF
- Terman and Miles's
Attitude Interest Analysis Survey
- Correlates of MF -- self and other
ratings of MF, intellectual and academic achievement, creativity, sexual
orientation, adjustment
- The value judgments attached to
early MF scales and early MF measurement
- Masculinity, femininity, and androgyny: Masculinity and
femininity as two separate trait dimensions
- Constantinople's (1973) influential critique of
traditional bipolar MF scales
- The two dimensional conception of
masculinity (M) and femininity (F): Masculinity as instrumental or agentic personality traits; femininity as expressive
or communal personality traits
- The M and F scales developed by Bem (1974) and by Spence, Helmreich,
and Stapp (1974)
- Classifying people as masculine
sex-typed, feminine sex-typed, androgynous, or undifferentiated: A
two-by-two system that resulted from categorizing people as
"low" or "high" and masculinity and on femininity
- Are androgynous people
"best"? -- e.g., do androgynous people show both good masculine
traits (e.g., independence) and good feminine traits (nurturance,
warmth); do androgynous people display more flexible kinds of behavior
than sex-typed people?
- M, F, and psychological adjustment:
research evidence
- Problems with the two-dimensional
model of M and F
- M and F overlap with the Big Five
personality traits
- M and F scales don't broadly
assess masculinity, femininity, sex-typing, or gender-role orientations;
rather, they more narrowly assess instrumentality (dominance) and
expressiveness (nurturance)
- Do MF, M, and F scales assess real
personality traits, or do they assess arbitrary social constructs? -- the
social constructionist position
- Bem's gender schema theory -- sex typing
reflects whether people possess or don't possess strong gender categories
and stereotypes, not essential traits of the individual, such as M or F
- Spence's multifactorial
view of gender
- Lay people's conceptions of masculinity and femininity
- How do lay people think about
masculinity and femininity? -- studies show that people construe M and F
to have many components, including personality traits, social roles,
physical appearance, interests, occupations, sexuality, and biological
factors
- Possible translation: Masculinity
and femininity are real but complex
- Masculinity-femininity defined in terms of interests:
the gender diagnosticity approach
- Focusing on interests rather than
on the personality traits of instrumentality and expressiveness
- Two important pieces of evidence
suggesting the importance of gender-related interests
- Gender-related interests and sex
differences in interests appear quite early in life
- Chilhood gender-related interests are
associated with adult sexual orientation
- The gender diagnosticity
approach is a compromise between essentialist and constructionist views
of masculinity and femininity
- GD is the probability that an
individual is predicted to be male or female based on some set of
gender-related information (e.g., their occupational preferences)
- Correlates of gender-related
interests: sex-ascribed M and F; M and F as rated by others; sexual
orientation; transsexual versus nontranssexual
status; men's prejudice and social dominance; mortality
- GD in terms of Holland's RIASEC model and the
People-Things dimension: People-orientation is feminine and female-typical;
Thing-orientation is masculine and male-typical
- Behavior genetic studies of GD:
There is a significant genetic component to individual differences in
GD, and most of the environmental component reflects the effect of
unique or noncommon environments (which differ
between siblings and make them dissimilar) rather than the effects of
shared or common environments (which are shared by siblings and tend to
make them similar)
- Synthesis and summary
- There are three primary dimensions
that have emerged from several decades of research: instrumentality;
expressiveness; and gender-related interests, which are strongly linked
to the People-Things dimension
- Masculinity and femininity are
traits that can be measured in various ways, and these traits prove to be
correlated with a number of social significant criteria