According to previous research, achieving women display nontraditional personality traits and are influenced by affiliative motives. To examine the needs exhibited by professional women who have made significant achievements, 23 career women (physicians, attorneys, veterinarians, business women, politicians, and artists) completed the Edwards…

Research on women in atypical occupations has generally focused on highly educated women and has neglected to compare atypically employed women to equally educated women in sex-typical occupations. Since the median American worker has only 13.6 years of schooling, the lack of research on the personality characteristics of noncollege-degreed women…

Males' and females' interaction styles were observed while they worked in four-person, mixed-sex groups on a discussion task. In some groups, members were only given information about each others' names and gender. Under these conditions, males were perceived higher in competence than females. Further, males were found to engage in a greater…

The reason that people think women and men differ in their general qualities may be that the two sexes tend to be observed in different social roles. To explore the sources of stereotypes about men and women several experiments were conducted. Most of the studies involved randomly selected college students who were presented with a description of…

Much research on masculinity and femininity has relied on the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and similar androgyny inventories. Recently, investigators have questioned whether self ratings on androgyny inventories reflect salient dimensions of the self. The relations between spontaneous self descriptions and the respondent's gender and gender role…

Research on gender stereotypes has contrasted males with females, describing males by competency traits and females by traits which denote warmth or emotionality. However, it has become clear that these traits do not satisfactorily describe all members of either sex, since not all men possess only masculine characteristics and not all women…

One unified aspect of men's gender role conflict is the fear of femininity, which can produce six conflicts: restrictive emotionality; homophobia; socialized control, power, and competition; restrictive affectionate behavior; obsession with achievement and success; and health care problems. To measure these constructs 85 items were generated from…

Research on the female offender has produced two explanations of the female criminal personality: the female offender either as a masculinated women or as an anguished woman possessing low self-esteem and poor self-control. To investigate the applicability of each position, 144 black male and female criminals and noncriminals completed the Bem Sex…

Although parental effects on the personality development of children have been well examined, fathers' influence and effects on older children have received little attention. To investigate fathers' involvement in the attitude and personality development of college women, 333 women, ages 18 to 23, completed a three-part questionnaire gathering…

Despite recent research showing men capable of nurturing behavior, most men remain reluctant to care for children. Some researchers have suggested that men are fearful of nurturing as a result of traditional sex role socialization while others have suggested an increased role of external factors in explaining the lack of men in child care (pay,…

The importance of role models for women achieving career success has received increased attention; however, there has been little agreement on a definition of the concept. To determine who college women say their role models are and to determine developmental discontinuities in women's reports of their role models, 377 college women completed two…

Four major formulations of the relationship between sex role orientation and successful adaptation have found support in the literature: a traditional sex role, androgyny, masculinity, and androgyny for females. The adaptive implications of sex role orientation were examined on constructs reflecting intrapersonal functioning, i.e., ego identity…

Previous research on the personality traits and needs of professional women has found that women in nontraditional roles possess traits that are more characteristic of the male sex role, and that in many instances they are higher on those traits. To determine sex and occupational differences in the self-perceptions of male and female psychologists…

Studies of the personality traits of counselors, particularly in relation to their sexuality, assumes that such traits are relevant to counselor effectiveness. To investigate the relationship between counselor effectiveness and sex role attitude, 66 counselor education students, 15 male and 51 female, aged 22-58, participated in individual…

Bem's androgyny theory predicts better psychological adjustment in androgynous males and females (those with a balance of masculine and feminine traits) than in traditionally masculine men or feminine women. However, recent research suggests that androgynous individuals have no advantage over masculine-typed individuals of either sex. To explore…