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Recent debate over integrating women into U.S. military combat units presents an opportunity to examine the gender identities and experiences of women in the military. Here, we examine the context-dependent prominence of intersecting identities including work role and gender ascribed to female soldiers in Special Operations. Using a mixed methods approach, based on 28 focus groups with 198 soldiers...
Social constructivist models of gender suggest that gendered attitudes and behaviors, such as femininity and masculinity, are context-dependent (Deaux and Major 1987). If this is the case, femininity and masculinity may be better conceptualized as variable states rather than as stable traits. In the present study, we used Ecological Momentary Assessment to investigate variations in femininity and...
The present study was designed to examine the evidence for Bem’s (1981) proposal that strong identification with gender (felt typicality, felt contentedness, felt pressure) promotes restrictive gender-typing (i.e., a preoccupied relationship style for girls; avoidant relationship style for boys). Per a dimension-specific model, I hypothesized that felt typicality and felt contentedness discourage...
Bem’s conceptualization of psychological androgyny introduced a new way of thinking in which crossing gender boundaries was seen as an adaptive form of flexibility that promoted better psychological adjustment. However, the research linking androgyny and adjustment was mixed, and unfortunately, flexibility was not adequately measured and was seldom investigated. Because of the failure to assess flexibility,...
We evaluated Bem’s (1981, 1993) thesis that psychological androgyny—perceiving the self to possess characteristics of both genders—is associated with healthy adjustment and minimal gender-polarizing cognition. Prior studies testing Bem’s ideas have yielded ambiguous results, mainly because self-perceptions of gender-typed attributes have been inferred narrowly from self-perceptions of expressive and...
We investigated associations between gender segregation and the two traditions of gender identity identified by Wood and Eagly (2015): gender-typed personality traits and gender reference group identity. We also investigated whether one of these traditions was associated with gender segregation to a greater extent than the other. Our sample consisted of 73 male (and 93 female undergraduate students...
Over 20 years since her last published new work, Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s ideas continue to inspire and influence many contemporary researchers—as reflected in the many excellent papers appearing in the two special issues of Sex Roles. In my review, I highlight how Sandra Bem was repeatedly at the vanguard of the intellectual zeitgeist that shaped the psychology of gender over the last four decades. Notably, Bem...
Research indicates that women are more interested in highbrow culture (i.e., the arts—art, music, and theatre—and literature) than men are. Current explanations for women’s higher involvement in highbrow cultural activities primarily focus on adults; overemphasize class-, work- and cultural capital-related explanations; and do not uncover the identity-related and interactional mechanisms behind the...
We propose that men scoring higher in precarious manhood beliefs (PMB) express amusement with sexist and anti-gay humor (but not other forms of humor) in response to masculinity threat in order to reaffirm their masculinity. Accordingly, Experiment 1 (166 heterosexual men in the United States recruited through Amazon.com ’s Mechanical Turk) supported the hypothesis that men higher in PMB express...
Janet Spence’s contributions moved gender researchers beyond a simple understanding of psychological gender in terms of individual differences in masculinity and femininity. In early work, she constructed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, or PAQ, consisting of a masculine and a feminine scale, which she interpreted as assessing the core of psychological masculinity and femininity. Spence subsequently...
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