Boys and girls together—and alienated: On enacting stereotyped sex roles in mixed-sex dyads.

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine how individual differences in sex role orientation—as assessed by the Bern Sex Role Inventory—were related to subjects' behavior during an initial, unstructured interaction in mixed-sex dyads. The design contrasted four different dyad types, characterized as follows: (a) Both the male and the female were stereotypically sex typed correspondent to their gender (male ST-female ST); (b) the male was stereotypically sex typed as masculine and the female was androgynous (male ST-female A); (c) the male was androgynous and the female was sex typed as feminine (male Afemale ST); and (d) both were androgynous (male A-female A). Analyses of the subjects' behavior during the S-minute interaction period and self-report data collected afterward revealed significantly less interaction and interpersonal attraction in the male ST-female ST dyads than in the other dyad types. The data are discussed in terms of Bern's conception of sex role identification and Snyder's conception of self-monitoring.