Psychological Androgyny and Children’s Mental Health: A New Look with New Measures

Abstract 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 instrumental personality traits. We administered measures of gender identity (self-perceived similarity to a gender) that more clearly capture self-perceptions of attributes typical of a gender, and we examined conjoint influences of same-gender typicality and other-gender typicality on children’s self-esteem, internalizing problems, felt pressure for gender differentiation, and sexist ideology. Two studies were conducted with ethnically/racially diverse samples of preadolescent children in the southeastern United States. In Study 1 (N = 305, M age = 10.8 years), androgynous children (i.e., children who saw themselves as similar to both genders) reported high self-esteem, evidenced few internalizing problems, and reported feeling little pressure for gender differentiation. In Study 2 (N = 236, M age = 11.3 years), androgynous boys reported few sexist beliefs. Children with other patterns of gender identity (e.g., high same-gender typicality coupled with low other-gender typ...
Source: Sex Roles - Category: Global & Universal Source Type: research