SEX, SEX-ROLE IDENTIFICATION, AND AWARENESS OF SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPES

An experiment was run to determine if androgynous people have transcended traditional sex roles or merely incorporated both sex roles into their repertoire. Masculine sex‐typed, feminine sex‐typed, and androgynous people listed as many masculine and feminine stereotypes as they could think of in a time‐limited task. Highly sex‐typed individuals showed more awareness of their own sex's attributes than the other sex's stereotypes. Androgynous people showed greater awareness of both sexes' attributes as compared with sex‐typed people, indicating support for the incorporation hypothesis rather than the transcendance hypothesis. However, the stereotypes androgynous people listed were somewhat less evaluative in tone compared with those of sex‐typed people, Overall, subjects listed more stereotypes of females than males, and female stereotypes were more negative than male stereotypes. Copyright © 1979, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved