Androgyny and the BSRI

Androgyny - A personality type displaying a balance of masculine and feminine characteristics in one’s personality.

Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI)- The first systematic attempt to measure androgyny using a rating scale of 60 traits (20 masculine, 20 feminine, 20 neutral) to produce scores across two dimensions: masculinity-femininity and androgynous-undifferentiated.

Over-representation of opposite sex characteristics does not qualify someone as androgynous.

Individuals that have a mixture of masculine and feminine traits are better equipped to adapt to a range of situations and contexts.

Young children (before 9 years) are more rigid about sex roles and therefore show little sign of androgyny.

Bem believed that avoiding fixed sex-role stereotypes was important to avoid mental health issues.

The undifferentiated category was added after criticisms by Spence et al (1975), to account for those individuals who were neither masculine or feminine.

Androgynous individuals have a different cognitive style (gender schema theory) and adopt behaviours that…