Gender Roles~Bem

Bem was an American psychologist known for her works in androgyny and gender studies. She created the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which is an inventory that acknowledges that individuals may exhibit both male and female characteristics. The BSRI is a scale developed to tell what kind of sex role an individual fulfills. It is a self-report inventory that asks participants how well 60 different attributes describe themselves by using a seven-point scale. These attributes reflect the definition of masculinity (20 questions) and femininity (20 questions), and the remaining 20 questions were merely filler questions In this inventory the feminine and masculine items were chosen on what was culturally appropriate for males and females at that time in the early 1970s. The BSRI was later used to measure psychological flexibility and behavioral indicators. Bem also developed the gender schema theory. This theory states that an individual uses gender as a way to organize various things in a person's life into categories. Her research questioned the social beliefs and assumptions that sex roles are opposite, bipolar, and mutually exclusive. The data she collected were supportive of a merging of male and female traits to enable a person to be a fully functioning, adaptive human over an emphasis on gender stereotypes.

 A person with high masculine and low feminine identification would be categorized as "masculine". A person with high feminine identification and low masculine identification, would be categorized as "feminine". A person who had high identification with both characteristics would be categorized as "androgynous". A person who has low identification with both dimensions would be considered "undifferentiated".

One of Bem's main arguments was that traditional gender roles are restrictive for both men and women, and can have negative consequences for individuals as well as society as a whole.

Koesterer. M,Dr. Sandra Lipsitz Bem: An Unconventional Life. retrieved from http://www2.webster.edu/~woolflm/sandrabem2.htm