• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

information for practice

news, new scholarship & more from around the world


advanced search
  • gary.holden@nyu.edu
  • @ Info4Practice
  • Archive
  • About
  • Help
  • Browse Key Journals
  • RSS Feeds

Gender, “masculinity,” and “femininity”: A meta-analytic review of gender differences in agency and communion.

Agency and communion are gender-stereotypical traits, which were explicitly designed to capture desirable attributes of men and women, respectively. Whereas the existence of gender gaps in agency and communion is commonly known, it remains unknown what the average magnitude, stability (over time and developmental age), and variability (across cultures, sampling strategies, and measures) of these gender differences are. Consistent with social role theory (Eagly, 1987; Wood & Eagly, 2012), the current meta-analysis estimated that men tended to be more agentic than women (g = 0.40, k = 928 samples, N = 254,731 participants), whereas women tended to be more communal than men (g = −0.56, k = 937 samples, N = 254,465 participants). Moderator analyses revealed that these gender differences in agency and communion have been decreasing over time. The gender gap in communion decreased with age but increased with country-level gender occupational segregation. Further, the gender gap in agency was larger when sampling participants as couples (vs. sampling as individuals), and the gaps in both agency and communion were larger in heterosexual (vs. gay/lesbian and bisexual) samples. An important methodological moderator was measurement instrument (e.g., short-form Bem Sex Role Inventory shows much smaller gender gaps than the long-form). Altogether, we leveraged a large database to reveal effects consistent with social role theory—that men are higher in agency (masculinity) and women are higher in communion (femininity)—while simultaneously offering insight into factors (earlier time period, occupational segregation, younger age, sampling in couples, heterosexual orientation) that serve to exacerbate such effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Read the full article ›

Posted in: Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews on 02/18/2022 | Link to this post on IFP |
Share

Primary Sidebar

Categories

Category RSS Feeds

  • Calls & Consultations
  • Clinical Trials
  • Funding
  • Grey Literature
  • Guidelines Plus
  • History
  • Infographics
  • Journal Article Abstracts
  • Meta-analyses - Systematic Reviews
  • Monographs & Edited Collections
  • News
  • Open Access Journal Articles
  • Podcasts
  • Video

© 1993-2025 Dr. Gary Holden. All rights reserved.

gary.holden@nyu.edu
@Info4Practice