We propose three important gaps in this body of work that limit understanding of how experiences of gender role discrepancy strain likely shape important outcomes. Moreover, examining these links in older populations could identify the ways in which social pressures and expectations placed on women promote discrepancy strain, and associated decreases in self-esteem, when processes related to aging make women feel less able to embody feminine qualities, such as those related to attractiveness (e.g., Hurd, 2000). Boys and men experience gender role strain when they (a) deviate from or violate gender role norms of masculinity, (b) try to meet or fail to Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 158162. Gender stereotypes have changed: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of US public opinion polls from 1946 to 2018. Managing Role Strain Examples Definition Role strain refers to the stress when, for any number of reasons, an individual cannot meet the demands of their social roles (Goode 1960). Thus, FGRS directly assesses individual differences in womens propensity to experience strain in gender role discrepant contexts, including (1) having unemotional relationships (e.g., Having others believe that you are emotionally cold), (2) being unattractive (e.g., Being perceived by others as overweight), (3) behaving assertively (e.g., Having to "sell" yourself at a job interview), (4) not being nurturant (e.g., A very close friend stops speaking to you), and (5) fear of victimization (e.g., Feeling that you are being followed by someone; Gillespie & Eisler, 1992). All predictor variables were entered simultaneously. Social Forces, 88(5), 19411968. What is evident is that strain has some role, but that this role is contested. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 10(3), 218. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015151, Deaux, K., & Major, B. Across two studies, higher FGRS (person-level discrepancy strain) and within-person decreases in daily (Study 1) and weekly (Study 2) felt-femininity (context-level discrepancy strain) predicted lower self-esteem, but higher FGRS combined with daily/weekly decreases in felt-femininity predicted the lowest self-esteem (person x context interaction). (2012). Future research could further explore how the findings we observed intersect with the importance of ones female identity. Women higher in FGRS also reported lower self-esteem across weeks. For instance, feminine discrepancy strain may arise from the failure to embody feminine characteristics related to attractiveness, but the most prevalent outcomes of experiences of strain in this particular context are likely to be those that match the attractiveness-related domain, such as potentially increasing womens body dissatisfaction (Harrington & Overall, 2021) and/or risk of eating disorders (Martz et al., 1995; Mussap, 2007). For consistency, when duplicate responses were identified, the second response was deleted, and the first response was retained. Our second analysis tested whether the interaction between within-person decreases in femininity and FGRS was unique and independent of MGRS. The Femininity Ideology Scale (FIS): Dimensions and its relationship to anxiety and feminine gender role stress. As detailed by the annotated syntax in the Online Supplement, these models treat each daily assessment as repeated measures within each participant and specify an autoregressive error structure (AR1) to account for the within-person associations across each daily report of the dependent variable (see Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013 for further details). These results illustrate that the person x context interaction shown in Fig. The abbreviated MGRS scale is commonly used and has established reliability and validity (McDermott et al., 2017; Swartout et al., 2015). Given prior research has primarily focused on the outcomes of gender role discrepancy strain for men, we first describe research focused on masculine gender role stress and strain to illustrate why it is important to apply a person x context perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(2), 195. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000059. The current research provides the first test of naturally occurring context-level feminine gender role discrepancy strain that emerges in womens daily and weekly lives. One approach to understanding the contexts in which feminine discrepancy strain commonly emerges would be to ask women open-ended questions about events in their lives that have made them feel less feminine. However, rather than focusing on a single, narrow experience in the lab, we directly examined context-level discrepancy strain by assessing drops in womens felt-femininity and self-esteem within the ecologically valid context of womens daily and weekly lives. Each daily record assessed participants feelings of femininity and self-esteem that day. Development of the abbreviated masculine gender role stress scale. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2000.00477.x, Bussey, K., & Bandura, A. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.10.008, Sanchez, D. T., & Crocker, J. Consistent with FGRS theory (Gillespie & Eisler, 1992), womens person-level propensity for experiencing discrepancy strain (e.g., greater FGRS) should predict negative outcomes most strongly within gender role discrepant contexts (a person x context interaction). Indeed, a central prediction of MGRS theory is that men higher in MGRS should be most likely to exhibit negative outcomes when they feel they are failing to live up to gender role expectations (Eisler & Skidmore, 1987). The femininity ideology scale: Factor structure, reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and social contextual variation. https://doi.org/10.1093/med:psych/9780195304633.003.0018, Rosenberg, M. (1965). Moreover, single-item assessments are common in daily sampling studies to reduce participant burden, and are appropriate, and even preferable, when the construct being measured is specific and unambiguous (see Allen et al., 2022). Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (ref no. Yet, our results also highlight the critical importance of taking a person x context perspective to assess the interaction between person-level and context-level gender role discrepancy strain. In the following sections, we elaborate how the current research expands understanding of gender role discrepancy strain processes and advances prior research. University Press. Auguste G. Harrington. Other, similar gender-related problems often . The concepts of gender role conflict and stress have their origin in Pleck's (1981, 1995) Gender Role Strain Paradigm, and refer to the psychological strain men experience around fulfilling expectations of themselves as men [18-21]. Similarly, we directly assessed a central outcome of gender role discrepancy strain. Calibrating the sociometer: The relational contingencies of self-esteem. We calculated the simple effects of both person-level (FGRS) and context-level (felt-femininity) discrepancy strain by calculating the effects of low (-1 SD) versus high (+1 SD) levels of each variable. The gender role strain paradigm stems from feminism and social learning theories. (1991) suggests that the perception of role strain (which includes overload) is influenced by a number of environmental antecedents: number of hours worked, flexibility of working hours, number of children and age of the youngest child. https://doi.org/10.1080/03630242.2014.996723, Robins, R. W., & Trzesniewski, K. H. (2005). https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483384269.n240, Raag, T., & Rackliff, C. L. (1998). Recent findings have suggested that increased gender role discrepancy stress in men is associated with psychological, physical, and sexual intimate partner violence (Reidy et al., 2014); high risk sexual behavior and risk for contracting STIs (Reidy et al., 2016); binge drinking (Yang et al., 2019); psychosocial maladjustment (Reidy et al., 2018. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 629. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.3.629, Rudman, L. A., & Fairchild, K. (2004). Status incongruity and backlash effects: Defending the gender hierarchy motivates prejudice against female leaders. Finally, rather than focusing on a single, narrow experience in the lab, the current studies illustrated the importance of drops in feelings of femininity within the ecologically valid context of womens daily and weekly lives. When power shapes interpersonal behavior: Low relationship power predicts mens aggressive responses to low situational power. We calculated the simple effects of both person-level (FGRS) and context-level (felt-femininity) discrepancy strain by calculating the effects of low (-1 SD) versus high (+1 SD) levels of each variable. American Journal of Sociology, 122(5), 14851532. Examining both potential causal pathways is a good direction for future research and will provide further support for the importance of the within-person associations between feelings of femininity and self-esteem (and other self-relevant outcomes). Gender schema theory and its implications for child development: Raising gender-aschematic children in a gender-schematic society. The myth of masculinity. In the current studies we assessed FGRS to capture person-level propensity to experience feminine discrepancy strain. https://doi.org/10.1300/J056v08n01_02, Chang, V. T., Overall, N. C., Madden, H., & Low, R. S. (2018). The FGRS scale was developed by Gillespie and Eisler (1992) to assess how stressful people find feminine gender role discrepant situations across five situations: having unemotional relationships (e.g., Being considered promiscuous), physical unattractiveness (e.g., Finding out that you have gained 10 pounds), behaving assertively (e.g., Supervising older and more experienced employees at work), failing to be nurturant (e.g., Returning to work soon after your child is born), and fear of victimization (e.g., Hearing a strange noise while you are home alone). https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2010.0040, Eagly, A. H., Nater, C., Miller, D. I., Kaufmann, M., & Sczesny, S. (2020). Other research has examined the effects of naturally-occurring gender role discrepant situations. Feminist research challenged gender essentialism when second-wave feminist researchers asserted that stereotypically feminine traits such as being nurturing, dependent, and emotional were not based in biology (Bohan, 1993).This research sought first to delineate sex from gender, and to frame them as two separate . (2021) demonstrated that men higher in MGRS were more likely to report enacting aggression towards their intimate partner, but these links emerged most strongly in the gender-role discrepant context of low relationship power (relative to high power). Again, we expected that both higher FGRS (person-level strain) and weeks involving lower felt-femininity (context-level strain) would predict lower self-esteem, but higher FGRS combined with lower weekly felt-femininity would predict the lowest self-esteem (a person x context interaction). To ensure that duplicate responses within a single week were not included, the days between each response were calculated and responses that occurred 3 or fewer days apart (and thus occurred during the same week) were deleted. Bem sex-role inventory. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SERS.0000011069.02279.4c, Swartout, K. M., Parrott, D. J., Cohn, A. M., Hagman, B. T., & Gallagher, K. E. (2015). Our analyses were not pre-registered. Figure1 (right side) displays this predicted person x context interaction. One component of the self-system is gender-role strain (GRS; perceived discrepancy between actual self and gender-role norms). Applying our person x context perspective, we expected that greater person-level discrepancy strain (higher FGRS) and greater context-level discrepancy strain (lower felt-femininity) would combine to determine daily and weekly levels of self-esteem. For instance, women could be told that they have scored low on a test of child-care skills (discrepant with nurturance expectations), are less attractive than the average woman (discrepant with attractiveness expectations), or are perceived as unfriendly or cold by a group of people (discrepant with communality expectations). First, the results emphasize that feminine gender role discrepancy strain, which is comparatively understudied compared to masculine gender role discrepancy strain, has negative implications for womens self-evaluations. The multi-level analysis used to assess daily associations between felt-femininity and self-esteem accounts for the small differences in numbers of entries across participants by weighting the final sample estimates based on the reliability of each participants data (i.e., participants with more daily records contribute more to the final estimates; Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013). Participants were instructed to complete an online questionnaire at the end of each day for 10days. This gender reevaluation includes a critical assessment of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny as norms for optimal functioning in a rapidly changing society. As outlined in the Introduction, we measured and modelled decreases in womens feelings of femininity in order to directly assess the experience of gender role discrepancy strain that may arise across various, idiosyncratic contexts encountered across womens daily life. We expected that both within-person decreases in weekly femininity and higher FGRS would be associated with lower self-esteem, but that weekly decreases in femininity and higher FGRS would interact to predict the lowest daily self-esteem. Feminine Gender Role Discrepancy Strain and Womens Self-Esteem in Daily and Weekly Life: A Person x Context Perspective. Role Conflict Examples 1. Consistent with calls for this type of contextual application to further understanding of gender role strain (Deaux & Major, 1987; Eckes & Trautner, 2012; Levant & Powell, 2017; ONeil, 2008; Smiler, 2004; Whorley & Addis, 2006), this rare person x context application illustrates that person-level gender role strain is most likely to predict negative outcomes in relevant gender role discrepant situations (in this case, low relationship power), and that context-level strain will predict negative outcomes most strongly for people who have a greater sensitivity to gender role strain (i.e., for those high but not low in MGRS). Single item measures in psychological science. In the current studies, we provide the first tests of whether between-person differences in FGRS (person-level discrepancy strain) and daily or weekly variation in felt-femininity (context-level discrepancy strain) combine to predict womens self-esteem. The Person x Context Interaction Between FGRS and Womens Daily (Study 1) and Weekly (Study 2) Feelings of Femininity Predicting Self-Esteem. a. In an initial in-person session, participants were provided detailed information about the study, gave informed consent, completed scales assessing FGRS and MGRS, and were given detailed instructions for completing a web-based daily sampling procedure for the following 10days. However, we do not see this reverse association as mutually exclusive to the direction we tested. Explaining sex differences in social behavior: A meta-analytic perspective. The development of self-esteem. How investment in gender ideals affects well-being: The role of external contingencies of self-worth. Two-hundred and seven women enrolled in a third-year undergraduate psychology course at a large city-based university participated for fulfillment of a research requirement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(6), 1325. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012453, Vescio, T. K., Schermerhorn, N. E., Gallegos, J. M., & Laubach, M. L. (2021). Alternatively, women could be placed in situations in which they are required to contravene feminine norms, such as a situation where they must behave assertively, take control, or argue a point. 1132). Self-esteem also may be a particularly relevant outcome of feminine gender role strain because the pressures women face to be nurturant, passive, communal, and dependent, may motivate women to exhibit internalized self-relevant negative reactions (Bussey & Bandura, 1992; Rudman, 1998). PubMedGoogle Scholar. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410605245, Efthim, P. W., Kenny, M. E., & Mahalik, J. R. (2001). 1 Citations Metrics Abstract How gender role attitudes develop during adolescence, and how biological, social, and cognitive factors predict this development, remains a matter of debate. Moreover, the negative outcomes arising from these contextual experiences are likely to be stronger for women with greater propensity to experience feminine gender role discrepancy strain. The developmental social psychology of gender. Review of a program of research. For example, women who view themselves as more communal (an important facet of traditional femininity) experience lower daily self-esteem when they fail to behave communally (i.e., are less attentive to their partners mood changes; Witt & Wood, 2010). As shown in Table 2, within-person decreases in daily feelings of femininity were associated with women reporting lower self-esteem. Stress and Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, 23(5), 343348. Gender identity. Second, by applying a person x context perspective, the results emphasize that understanding of gender-role discrepancy strain is enhanced when both person-level differences and context-level effects are examined in combination. Women receiving feedback that they are more masculine or more like men (vs. a control condition) eat less in a social context, thereby presenting a desired feminine ideal (Mori et al., 1987), and express more support for victims of sexual assault, thereby identifying more with feminine social identities (Munsch & Willer, 2012). As expected, in both studies, higher FGRS (person-level discrepancy strain) and within-person decreases in daily and weekly femininity (context-level discrepancy strain) predicted lower self-esteem, but higher FGRS combined with daily decreases in femininity predicted the lowest self-esteem (person x context interaction). Sex Roles 87, 3551 (2022). Reactions to counterstereotypic behavior: The role of backlash in cultural stereotype maintenance. (2009). https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167291173011, Eckes, T., & Trautner, H. M. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. European Journal of Psychological Assessment. The gender role strain paradigm: An update. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 2(1), 34. https://doi.org/10.1037/1524-9220.2.1.34, Gillespie, B. L., & Eisler, R. M. (1992). The Trolley Problem The Trolley Problem is a well-known thought experiment in which a person has to make a choice between two outcomes, causing a role conflict. Prior research has shown that person-level differences in the propensity to experience feminine gender role strain (e.g., FGRS) are associated with outcomes related to internalized feelings of low self-worth (e.g., greater depressed mood, shame, and guilt; Efthim et al., 2001; Gillespie & Eisler, 1992), but the current results show these person-level effects occurred most strongly in contexts when women experience gender role discrepancy strain as indicated by daily and weekly decreases in feelings of femininity. This prior research has demonstrated that person-level and context-level gender role discrepancy strain have harmful outcomes for men in isolation. Men who place im-portance on conforming to . Sex Roles, 27(11), 573607. Harrington, A.G., Overall, N.C. & Maxwell, J.A. Moreover, the results validate FGRS as a measure of propensity for strain in discrepant contexts by demonstrating that when women higher in FGRS experienced feminine gender role discrepancy (lower daily or weekly felt-femininity) they experienced greater strain (decreases in self-esteem) than women lower in FGRS. However, these initiatives should also account for womens investment in feminine gender roles, as the current results highlight that the impact of feeling less feminine will be particularly challenging for women who have greater person-level propensity for experiencing feminine discrepancy strain. Focusing on the context-level effects of drops in femininity across women low versus high in FGRS, women experience lower self-esteem on weeks they felt lower femininity, but this association was strongest for women higher in FGRS (dashed line: B=.301, t=6.071, 95% CI [.202, .400], p<.001) compared to women lower in FGRS (solid line: B=.123, t=3.734, 95% CI [.058, .188], p<.001). Assessing the effect size of outcome research. At the end of each week for 7weeks, participants received an e-mail with a link to a questionnaire they were asked to complete as soon as possible (and preferably within 12days). Violence Against Women, 18(10), 11251146. Specifically, as the current results illustrate, context-level feminine gender role discrepancy strain should have stronger effects for women higher in FGRS, and may have weaker or null effects for women lower in FGRS. Our analyses were not pre-registered. To illustrate the relevance of this approach, one study by Harrington et al. Although no prior research has tested the links between FGRS, felt-femininity, and self-esteem, some findings support our perspective that person-level (FGRS) and context-level (felt-femininity) gender role strain will combine to predict womens self-esteem. Consulting Psychology Press. In the final sample, 122 (74.4%) completed all seven weekly questionnaires, 35 (21.3%) completed six weekly questionnaires, and 7 (4.3%) completed five weekly questionnaires. By person-centering, the effect of felt-femininity represents daily variations in feelings of femininity from each persons typical levels, and thus tests whether within-person changes in daily felt-femininity predict within-person changes in self-esteem (person-centering is standard practice in multi-level modelling; see Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013). Approval was obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee (ref no. A man who experiences tension in his marriage because he is spending long hours at work b. Critically, the daily and weekly links between womens feelings of femininity and self-esteem and were not affected by their general tendency to find challenging situations of all types stressful (i.e., not feminine-role specific; captured by MGRS). Additionally, expanding the strengths of the current studies, daily or weekly sampling studies could incorporate open-ended descriptions of events that made women feel more or less feminine. Within-person reductions in felt-femininity undermine self-esteem, as we outlined, which is supported by other research showing that failure to enact desired feminine behavior is associated with decreases in self-esteem (Sanchez & Crocker, 2005; Witt & Wood, 2010). Journal of Personality Assessment, 52(1), 133141. After completing measures of FGRS, undergraduate women reported their feelings of femininity and self-esteem each day for 10days (Study 1, N=207, 1,881 daily records) or each week for 7weeks (Study 2, N=165, 1,127 weekly records).
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