Gender differences in self-esteem, unvarnished self-evaluation, future orientation, self-enhancement and self-derogation in a U.S. national sample

Abstract

American men tend to score slightly higher on measures of self-esteem than American women. We ask whether this is because of gender differences in responsiveness to the positive and negative phrasing of self-related survey statements used to assess self-esteem. We argue that self-enhancing and self-derogatory tendencies can be inferred from wording valence effects that are common to both self-esteem and optimism. Including latent factors for those response tendencies in a bifactor measurement model transforms the latent factors for self-esteem and optimism into “unvarnished” forms of self-evaluation and future orientation. The bifactor model is shown to fit data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) better than a conventional measurement model. Although we observe a gender difference in self-esteem, as identified in the conventional model, no gender difference is observed in unvarnished self-evaluation identified in the bifactor model. Our results are consistent with the idea that self-esteem differs by gender due to a greater tendency for men to agree with positively worded self-statements, and a greater tendency for women to agree with negatively worded self-statements. We argue that those tendencies can be interpreted respectively as reflecting unconscious dispositions to self-enhance and self-derogate.