Sex-role Concepts Research Articles

Egg size variation in the context of polyandry: a case study using long-term field data from snowy plovers.

Gamete size variation between the sexes is central to the concept of sex roles, however, to what extent gamete size variation within the sexes relates to sex role variation remains unclear. Comparative and theoretical studies suggest that, when clutch size is invariable, polyandry is linked to a reduction of egg size, while increased female-female competition for mates favors early breeding when females cannot monopolize multiple males. To understand whether and how breeding phenology, egg size, and mating behavior are related at the individual level, we studied the reproductive histories of 424 snowy plover females observed in the wild over a 15-year period. Egg size, but not polyandry, were highly repeatable for individual females. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we found that polyandrous females were the earliest breeders and that early clutches contained smaller eggs than clutches initiated later. Neither egg size nor mating behavior showed clear signs of an age-related deterioration, on the contrary, prior experience acquired either through age or local recruitment enabled females to nest early. Taken together, these results suggest that gamete size variation is not linked to mating behavior at the individual level, and, consequently, the adaptive potential of such variation appears to be limited.

Dental students' attitude to gender roles

This investigation assessed attitudes held by United States women and men dental students toward professional and sex role concepts. The concepts included: female dental student, male dental student, dentist, adult woman, adult man, wife and husband. These attitudes were evaluated and compared in the context of the students' current and future professional roles and their sex roles. Although there were several differences in attitudes between the two subject groups, the results suggest that the women and men dental students viewed their various roles as consistent with one another. It is particularly important to note that the women dental student is viewed by both gender groups as having professional and sex roles which do not conflict.

Patterns of family interaction and adolescent sex role concepts

This study examined the relationship between patterns of family interaction and adolescent development of sex role concepts. Sixty-six families of high school seniors completed a measure of daily family activities and a Plan Something Together Task, used to measure individuation in family communication. Adolescents' responses on the sex roles section of the Ego Identity Interview were coded to reflect Block's theory of the stages of development of sex role concepts. Results indicated gender differences in the development of sex role concepts as related to distinctive patterns of family communication and daily activity with the adolescents' mothers and fathers.

Gender differences in adolescents' identity development in the domain of sex role concepts

This study presents descriptive analysis of gender differences in the content of adolescents' responses on a measure of identity development in the domain of sex role concepts. Subjects included 66 white, middle-class, high school seniors. Responses on the sex roles section of the Ego Identity Interview were coded to reflect Block's (1973) theory of the stages of development of sex role concepts with a particular focus on the stages of “conformity” and “conscientiousness.” Only one gender difference emerged. Male adolescents, as compared to female adolescents, more frequently expressed conformity level responses to questions regarding acceptance of non-traditional behavior for men and women. Discussion focused on adolescents' perceptions of peer and parental influences on their development of sex role concepts.

Sex-Related Values and Attitudes of College Students: A Sexism Scale vs the Semantic Differential

To measure sexist attitudes, 50 men and 50 women completed two instruments One was a nondisguised type—the Rombough-Ventimiglia Sexism Scale; the other disguised—the semantic differential with ratings on sex-role concepts. On the basis of scores on the Rombough-Ventimiglia Scale, men were divided into High (traditional) and Low (emancipated) scoring groups. The same procedure was followed for women's scores. As expected the Rombough-Ventimiglia scales showed significant differences between High and Low attitude groups and also between men and women. However, the semantic differential comparisons between High and Low scoring groups for men show significant differences on only three of the 36 concepts rated; women's scores show 10 significant differences. Comparisons between men and women on the semantic differential show significant differences on 20 concepts. The results can be interpreted as indicating that men may introduce a certain element of distortion in responding to conventional sexism scales.

When professional nurses return to school: A study of role conflict and well-being in multiple-role women

The effect of multiple roles on professional nurses who return to a formal program of education was examined, as was sex-role concept, to assess how they effect perceptions of role conflict and level of well-being. Four research questions were developed to study these presumed relationships and were tested primarily with nonparametric statistics because of the small sample size and the categorical nature of the data. One hundred fifty-five female students were asked to complete a biographical data sheet, the Bem Inventory, and the CES-D scale. The results show that for professional nurses who return to school, the occupancy of multiple roles does not increase perceived role conflict; in fact, nurses with more roles experience greater well-being than nurses with fewer roles. The role of parent, more than any other role, is a major source of conflict. Increased social supports for the returning student result in less perceived role conflict. A feminine sex-role identity does not increase perceived role conflict, yet these women show a level of psychological well-being that is significantly lower than that of women with a masculine sex-role identity.

Toward a new research model of gender in management and leadership studies

The roles of men and women have been lively discussed and investigated in the fields of psychology and sociology for years. This discussion has recently reached the field of management and leadership studies as well. However, in the studies of working life the work women do has for a long time remained rather invisible and gender has only been a variable among others. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of sex roles, gender and their influence on the studies of working life, with special focus on supervisory and leadership studies of working life. Before inspecting the emergence of gender in the studies of working life, it is, however, necessary to specify the concepts used and some of the models by which women's employment and the segmentation of the labour market have been explained. In addition, some implications for counselling are discussed.

Cognitive accessibility of sex role concepts and attitudes toward political participation: The impact of sexist advertisements

Women who were exposed to advertisements that portrayed women in their traditional role as homemakers reported less favorable attitudes toward political participation than women who were not exposed to advertisements. Exposure to portrayals of women as sex objects, on the other hand, did not affect women's attitudes. In contrast, men reported less favorable attitudes toward political participation after exposure to advertisements that portrayed women as sex objects, but were not affected by portrayals of women as homemakers. Implications for the influence of sex roles on political participation and the impact of sexist advertisements are discussed.

Feminist theory and the study of gender and education

This paper considers the three main Western feminist theoretical frameworks — liberal, socialist and radical — and their educational applications. Examples of studies using each approach are discussed. Liberal feminists writing about education use concepts of equal opportunities, socialization, sex roles and discrimination. Their strategies involve altering socialization practices, changing attitudes and making use of relevant legislation. Critics of the liberal school point to conceptual limitations and the liberal reluctance to confront power and patriarchy. Socialist feminists analyze the role of the school in the perpetuation of gender divisions under capitalism. Major concepts are socio-cultural reproduction and to a lesser extent acceptance of and resistance to gender-based patterns of behaviour. So far socialist-feminist educational writing is mainly theoretical rather than practical and has therefore been criticized for its over-determinism and insufficient empiric foundation. Radical feminists in education have concentrated mainly on the male monopolization of knowledge and culture and on sexual politics in schools. Strategies involve putting women's and girls' concerns first, through separate-sex groups when necessary. Critics argue that radical feminism tends towards biological reductionism, description rather than explanation and also contains methodological weaknesses. Mutual criticism of perspectives seems less destructive in educational writing than in some other categories of feminist scholarship. All the theoretical frameworks are subject to the same pressures including the oppressive power of structures, the resilience of individuals, and the tension between universality (how women are the same) and diversity (how women differ on attributes like class and race).

Preschool Children's Conceptions of Sex-Role Transgressions

SMETANA, JUDITH G. Preschool Children's Conceptions of Sex-Role Transgressions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1986, 57, 862-871. The purpose of this research was to examine the conceptual basis of preschoolers' judgments regarding cross-gender behavior, taking into consideration the type of sexrole regularity and whether it is male or female sex-role stereotyped. 48 preschool children, 24 boys and 24 girls, reasoned and made judgments about counterstereotypical sex-role behaviors and appearances in comparison to judgments regarding moral and conventional transgressions. Sex-role transgressions were judged to be more flexible, permissible, and subject to subordinate jurisdiction than moral or conventional transgressions. Children were more strongly committed to the maintenance of male than female sex-role expectations and to female sex-typed appearances than activities. Boys also considered male cross-gender appearances more serious than male cross-gender activities. Children reasoned about sex-role violations as personal or conventional issues; male sex-role deviations were more likely to be seen as violations of social norms than were female sex-role deviations. Personal reasoning about sex roles was significantly correlated with greater flexibility and less commitment to sex-role expectations. Thus, young children were flexible but committed to sex-role expectations, and sex-role concepts were multifaceted, entailing different types of social concepts.

The Effects of Assertive Training on Sex Role Concept in Female Agoraphobics

Agoraphobia in women has often been associated with a restricted, overly-feminine sex role definition. We investigated whether assertiveness training from a female therapist would benefit agoraphobic women not only by teaching skills but incidentally by modeling a broader feminine gender role. Of 14 clients from an agoraphobic treatment program seven received assertiveness training as an adjunct to regular therapy. Sex role definition and assertiveness attitudes were measured with the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974) and the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule (Rathus, 1973), administered before and following a 7-week treatment period. All the agoraphobics initially had significantly lower Masculinity scores on the PAQ than did large normative samples. T-tests performed on the data indicated that the assertiveness group's Masculinity scores increased after treatment to the level of the normative samples, while the comparison group did not change. Results supported the clini...

Persistence and change in sex-role stereotypes

Persistence and change in sex-role stereotypes were examined by replicating in 1978 a study of sex-role conceptions published by Sherriffs and McKee in 1957. Results suggested that in many particulars sex-role stereotypes have changed little over the intervening two decades. Respondents of both sexes continued to view men as more forceful, independent, stubborn, and reckless than women; and women continued to be viewed as more mannerly, giving, emotional, and submissive than men. On the other hand, many changes in sex-role conceptions were also found to have occurred. Especially for female respondents, results suggested that stereotypes have changed in the direction of greater favorability toward women and less favorability toward men. The relevance of these findings to the psychological understanding of social change is discussed.

The development of sex typing: Themes from recent research

A conceptual framework for organizing the constructs and content areas included in research on sex typing is presented in this review of recent research on the development of sex typing. Two major themes are discussed. First, sex-typed play activities and interests emerge clearly in the first few years of life. Both play activities and peer preferences are sex typed earlier and more definitely than are personality traits and social behaviors such as aggression or dependency. It is suggested that researchers have underemphasized the importance of interests, activities, and peer associations while overemphasizing personality attributes as the core of sex typing. The second theme is that cognitions and concepts about sex typing are important in the acquisition of gender typing, but they are not sufficient by themselves for understanding the process by which sex-typed behavior is acquired. Children's sex-role concepts are sometimes related to their behavioral preferences, but other factors are also important influences on behavior.

Life satisfaction and sex-role concept

The purpose of the present survey study was to investigate the relationship between life satisfaction and sex-role concept. Two hundred and seventeen respondents completed a two-part questionnaire, which consisted of the Life Satisfaction Survey, designed by the authors, and the Bem Sex Role Inventory. General satisfaction with life was found to be a function of the level of satisfaction derived from various aspects of life, particularly aspects chosen as the most important. Consistent with previous studies, general satisfaction with life is positively associated with education level, income level, and being married. In contrast to previous findings, age is not negatively correlated with overall satisfaction, and a significant difference between males and females showed up. As predicted, sex-role concept was found to be a useful construct in explaining the differential importance of various domains of life as well as the relative contribution of those domains to the individual's overall satisfaction with life. Psychologically masculine people choose as important and enjoy more the instrumental aspects of life; psychologically feminine people choose as important and enjoy more the socioemotional aspects of life; psychologically androgynous people choose as important and enjoy more both the instrumental and socioemotional aspects of life.

Abortion outcome as a function of sex-role identification.

The present study investigated the relationship between sex-role identification and abortion outcome in 120 women receiving 1st trimester abortions. The sex-role concept dimension was measured both ty self-attributions of sex-role traits (as measured by the Bem Sex-Role Inventory) and by lifestyle (career vs. homemaker) trait attbibutions. Psychological and physiological aspects of abortion outcome were included: slighlty more than 7% of scores were in the symptomatic range, similar to percentages found in previous studies. Both Androgyny (r = -.42, p.001) and Masculinity (r = -.23, p.05) were found to be related to positive abortion outcome. Androgyny was more strongly related, which suggests that a balance of masculine and feminine traits, at least for women in the post-abortion situation, is prefereable to high Masculinity scores alone. Congruence between one's self-image and one's image of a career woman was also found to be related to abortion outcome (r = .31, P.01). In attempting to differentiate between the upper and lower 10% of the distribution of abortion outcome, only 2 variables, Androgyny and self-career congruence, survived parameter criterion, and accounted for 32% of the variance.

Changes in coeds' sex role concepts: 1969 and 1980

In 1969, as part of a larger study, a sample (N = 177) of Kent State University senior women responded to the Fand Inventory of Feminine Values, a sex role inventory. A similar sample (N = 180) of senior women responded to the same inventory in 1980. Although it was expected that the 1980 sample would exhibit more “liberated” attitudes on this index, the extent of change was unanticipated. When the responses were compared, it was found that the 1980 sample expressed more liberal attitudes within every category of each of twelve variables. A multivariate analysis indicated that attitudinal variables explained more of the variance in sex role concepts than did soicodemographic variables. A comparison of these findings is made with those on other campuses, and with the general adult population.

Cultural sex-role expectations and children's sex-role concepts

Middle-class children between the ages of 4 and 8 were interviewed about their sex-role attitudes, in order to determine the extent to which recently changing cultural mores have influenced children's sex-role concepts. The children were asked about their career goals; the careers they would choose if they were the opposite sex; the reasons why they like being a boy or girl; and their opinions regarding the appropriateness of men and women participating in 14 sex-stereotypic occupations and activities. The children's parents provided demographic information. The children expressed very nonstereotypic attitudes towards the 14 occupations and activities, compared to children in recent studies; but they chose very traditional careers for their own choices and opposite-sex career choices, and often gave stereotypic reasons for preferring their own sex. Parents' education, mothers' employment status, fathers' nontraditional careers, and the children's gender predict responses to several of the sex-role-related questions. Implications for research are discussed.

The development of the concepts of masculinity and femininity in young children

Sex-role concepts in 140 children aged 3 to 7 were assessed by means of an instrument that allowed children to categorize attributes as being characteristic of males only, females only, both males and females, or nobody. The children sorted attributes once for adult peer stimulus figures and once for peer stimulus figures. The relationship of gender conservation to the degree of stereotyping of children's response was also investigated. The overlap children saw between characteristics of males and females increased with age over the age span studied. Girls were less sex-typed than boys, particularly those girls whose mothers were employed. Gender conservation was associated with decreased sex-typing. The tendency of children to assign positive attributes to their own sex and negative attributes to the other sex peaked at age 5. Subjects overall were less sex-typed in their views of adults than peers.

Shifting sex roles: The silence of the family therapy literature

This article suggests that it is important for family therapists to be attuned to the struggles families are experiencing in relation to their changing sex role mores. Traditional ideas about what is feminine and masculine still exist while new realities with new values are emerging. Although one would expect the family therapy literature to be discussing and clarifying the implications of sex role shifts for individuals within the family and for the family as a whole, it has been surprisingly silent. This article reviews the concept of sex roles and discusses it from the perspective of the dichotomization of gender. Object relations theory is suggested as a framework by which sex role differentiation and particularly its more polarized aspect can be understood.

The effects of sex and sex-role concept on self-disclosure

Socialization into traditional sex-role concepts has been offered as an explanation of sex differences in self-disclosure. The present experiment tested a derivation of this hypothesis: Androgynous males would self-disclose more intimately than sex-typed males. A 2×2×2×2 factorial design was used with sex of subject, sex-role concept of subject, sex of target person, and disclosure level of target person as the independent variables. The results failed to demonstrate an overall difference between androgynous and sex-typed males, while significant sex differences and a strong reciprocity effect were obtained. With both male and female subjects, androgynous subjects did disclose more than sex-typed subjects when the target person had exhibited high disclosure. The findings are discussed in terms of two hypotheses: (1) compliance to a social norm regarding male disclosure to strangers; (2) flexibility of the disclosing behavior of androgynous subjects.