In a seminal study on masculinity and femininity, Deaux and Lewis (1984) investigated the perceived relationship between gender and gender-related components, such as role behaviors (e.g., head of household vs. Complementary research has investigated many different aspects of gender, for example, gender-role norms (e.g., Athenstaedt, 2000 Thompson and Bennet, 2015 Klocke and Lamberty, unpublished manuscript). It is important to note that the focus of the present paper is on gender-related self-assessment. We define “traditional masculinity” and “traditional femininity” as relatively enduring characteristics encompassing traits, appearances, interests, and behaviors that have traditionally been considered relatively more typical of women and men, respectively (adapting the definitions provided by Constantinople, 1973). Using a known-groups approach, we present two studies testing this measure's reliability as well as its incremental and criterion validity, and we provide evidence for its convergent validity. In the present article, we introduce a new, extended, but still parsimonious scale, the Traditional Masculinity-Femininity Scale, TMF, to fill this gap. To date, these constructs can only be measured using two items, “masculine” and “feminine,” which is somewhat limited given that established standards of psychological assessment typically recommend using a larger number of items (e.g., Bühner, 2010). In the present paper, we argue that a scale that reliably and validly measures differences in an individual's underlying conceptualization of his or her own masculinity-femininity would be valuable for gender research. Still, gender differences in self-ascriptions do continue to exist, and there are attempts to measure different aspects of masculinity and femininity, including, for example, everyday behavior such as housework ( Athenstaedt, 2003). In recent years, such measures have often failed to find between-gender differences in self-ascriptions of gender stereotypical traits (e.g., Sczesny et al., 2004), which is presumably due to changes in gender roles across the decades (e.g., Diekman and Eagly, 2000 Wilde and Diekman, 2005 Ebert et al., 2014). typically female ( Constantinople, 1973). Since the 1970s, following Bem's (1974) pioneering work, many scales have been designed, developed, and widely used for measuring traits traditionally considered as typically male vs. Gender is also one of the first social categories that children learn in today's societies, and thus knowledge of gender stereotypes is evident from early childhood on (for a recent review, see Steffens and Viladot, 2015) and into adulthood, with both adolescents and college students construing their self-concepts in line with the gender stereotypes they have internalized (e.g., Nosek et al., 2002 Steffens et al., 2010). Taken together, as long as gender differences continue to exist, we suggest that the TMF provides a valuable methodological addition for research into gender stereotypes.Įvery time a group of people is addressed as “Ladies and Gentlemen!” the pervasiveness of gender over all other social categories is demonstrated. Furthermore, the TMF was connected to criterion characteristics, such as judgments as straight by laypersons for the whole sample, voice pitch characteristics for the female subsample, and contact to gay men for the male subsample, and outperformed other gender-related scales. Demonstrating incremental validity, the TMF predicted gender and sexual orientation in a superior way than established adjective-based measures. Moreover, the TMF correlated moderately with other gender-related measures.
As expected the TMF reliably measured a one-dimensional masculinity-femininity construct. Studies 1–2 used known-groups approaches (participants differing in gender and sexual orientation) to validate the scale and provide evidence of its convergent validity. We introduce a new and brief scale, the Traditional Masculinity-Femininity (TMF) scale, designed to assess central facets of self-ascribed masculinity-femininity. We argue that it is useful to be able to measure these two core concepts in a reliable, valid, and parsimonious way.
Although omitted in later version, Bem's original Sex Role Inventory included the items “masculine” and “feminine” in addition to more specific gender-stereotypical attributes. Several scales have been developed to measure fundamental aspects of gender stereotypes (e.g., agency and communion, competence and warmth, or instrumentality and expressivity). Gender stereotype theory suggests that men are generally perceived as more masculine than women, whereas women are generally perceived as more feminine than men.
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