170 Chapter 5concerned with adhering to behavior consis-
tent with the norms for the other sex.
Bem (1984) advanced her gender schema
theory by showing that sex-typed people
engage in gender schematic processing. For
example, in one study, she flashed the 60 at-
tributes of the Bem Sex Role Inventory on a
screen. College students were asked to de-
cide whether the attribute described them.
The dependent variable in this experiment
was how quickly the student made the judg-
ment. Bem hypothesized that sex-typed
respondents, compared to androgynous re-
spondents, would decide more quickly that a
sex-appropriate attribute described them and
that a sex-inappropriate attribute did not de-
scribe them. For example, a feminine female
could quickly decide that yes, she is “helpful”
and no, she is not “loud.” Sex-typed respon-
dents were also expected to take longer to
reject a sex-appropriate attribute and to take
longer to accept a sex-inappropriate attribute
compared to androgynous individuals. So that
same feminine female would take longer to
admit that no, she does not cook and yes, she
is competitive. The results confirmed the hy-
pothesis. The left half of Figure 5.11 indicates
how quickly people endorsed terms that were
consistent with gender-role schemas com-
pared to terms that were neutral. It appears
that sex-typed individuals were faster in mak-
ing schema-consistent judgments than cross-
sex-typed, androgynous, and undifferentiated
individuals. The right half of Figure 5.11 in-
dicates how quickly people endorsed terms
that were inconsistent with gender-role sche-
mas compared to terms that were neutral.
Sex-typed individuals were slower in making
schema-inconsistent judgments, especially
relative to cross-sex-typed, androgynous, and
undifferentiated individuals. In other studies,
Bem found that sex-typed individuals were
more likely to categorize a list of attributes inperson that a secretary cannot be male, that it
is not okay for a male to wear a barrette, or that
girls should not play with trucks.
Gender schema theory is a theory about
the process by which we acquire gender roles;
it is not a theory that describes the content of
those roles. The theory simply states that we
divide the world into masculine and femi-
nine categories. The culture defines those
categories. Gender schema theory combines
elements of both social learning theory and
cognitive development theory in describing
how we acquire gender roles. Social learning
theory explains how we acquire the features
of the male and female gender categories and
what we associate with those categories. Cog-
nitive development theory describes how we
begin to encode new information into these
cognitive categories to maintain consistency.
A child learns to invoke a gender-role category
or schema when processing new information.
A construct with which you may be
more familiar than gender schema theory is
androgyny. Recall that the androgynous in-
dividual has both feminine and masculine
attributes (Bem, 1981). Bem linked gender
schematicity to the construct of androgyny.
Because the gender aschematic person does
not use gender as a guiding principle when
thinking about how to behave, Bem sug-
gested this person would incorporate both
traditionally feminine and traditionally mas-
culine qualities into her or his self-concept,
or be androgynous. Bem presumed the
gender aschematic person would have the
flexibility to develop both feminine and mas-
culine qualities. By contrast, gender sche-
matic people were thought to be sex-typed,
that is, feminine if female and masculine if
male. Theoretically, cross-sex-typed people
(feminine males, masculine females) are also
gender schematic; they would still use gen-
der as an organizing principle but would beM05_HELG0185_04_SE_C05.indd 170 6/21/11 8:03 AM