Psychological Femininity and the Prospective Female Physical Educator

Women with high interest in sports and games involving physical skill have often been assumed to differ from other women in certain personality dispositions and, in particular, psychological femininity, since high interest in sports has been found to be negatively associated with the female sex role in American society. In order to test this assumption, prospective female physical educators and education majors, who were matched on socioeconomic status, were compared on the masculinity-femininity scale from the MMPI as well as the Gough Scale of Psychological Femininity. On both of these scales physical education majors had significantly lower and less feminine scores than the education majors. However, when individual test items were placed according to content into 11 categories, education majors, as opposed to physical education majors, were found to differ in a feminine direction in only two categories — that of Restrained and Cautious and Religious Beliefs.