56 Chapter 2femininity scales in half to create the four
groups shown in Figure 2.7.
Someone who possessed a high number
of masculine features and a low number of
feminine features was designated masculine;
someone who possessed a high number of
feminine and a low number of masculine fea-
tures was designated feminine. These people
were referred to as sex-typed if their sex cor-
responded to their gender role. The androgy-
nous person was someone who possessed a
high number of both masculine and feminine
features. A person who had few masculine or
feminine traits was referred to as undifferen-
tiated. To this day, most researchers still do
not know the meaning of this last category,
yet they often create these four categories
when using either the PAQ or the BSRI.
Androgyny was put forth by Bem (1974,
1975) as an ideal: The androgynous person
was one who embodied the socially desirable
features of both masculinity and femininity.
It was no longer believed the most psycho-
logically healthy people were masculine men
and feminine women; instead, the healthiest
people were thought to be those who pos-
sessed both attributes. Androgynous peo-
ple were supposed to have the best of both
worlds and to demonstrate the greatest be-
havioral flexibility and the best psychologi-
cal adjustment. Unfortunately, subsequent
research revealed that the masculinity scale
alone predicts behavioral flexibility andcommunal attributes flashed on a screen,
one at a time, and have to indicate whether
the attribute reflects a self-related term or an
other-related term as well as whether the at-
tribute characterizes themselves or not. The
measure correlates with self-report measures
of agency and communion and reveals larger
sex differences, perhaps because the implicit
measure reduces demand characteristics. To
date, it is not known whether these measures
predict behavior (Wood & Eagly, 2009).Androgyny. One outgrowth of these two
M/F inventories (the BSRI and the PAQ)
was the conceptualization of and research on
androgyny. Androgyny emerged from the
operationalization of masculinity and femi-
ninity as unipolar, independent dimensions.
The androgynous person was someone who
displayed both masculine and feminine traits.
Androgyny was first measured with the BSRI
by subtracting the masculinity score from the
femininity score. Positive difference scores
reflected femininity, and negative difference
scores reflected masculinity. Scores near zero
reflected androgyny, signifying that people
had a relatively equal amount of both traits. A
male who scored masculine and a female who
scored feminine were referred to assex-typed.
A masculine female and a feminine male were
referred to ascross-sex-typed. One prob-
lem with this measurement of androgyny is
that the score did not distinguish between peo-
ple who endorsed many masculine and femi-
nine qualities from people who endorsed only a
few masculine and feminine qualities. Someone
who endorsed 10 masculine and 10 feminine
traits received the same score (0) as someone
who endorsed 2 masculine and 2 feminine
traits; both were viewed as androgynous.
Spence and colleagues (1974) had an
alternative system for scoring androgyny.
They divided scores on the masculinity andUndifferentiated MasculineFeminineFemininityMasculinity
Low
LowHighHigh AndrogynousFIGURE 2.7 This is a sex-typing typology based
on people’s scores on masculinity and femininity.M02_HELG0185_04_SE_C02.indd 56 6/21/11 12:19 PM