The measurement of psychological androgyny.

This article describes the development of a new sex-role inventory that treats masculinity and femininity as two independent dimensions, thereby making it possible to characterize a person as masculine, feminine, or androgynous as a function of the difference between his or her endorsement of masculine and feminine personality characteristics. Normative data are presented, as well as the results of various psychometric analyses. The major findings of conceptual interest are: (a) the dimensions of masculinity and femininity are empirically as well as logically independent; (6) the concept of psychological androgyny is a reliable one; and (c) highly sex-typed scores do not reflect a general tendency to respond in a socially desirable direction, but rather a specific tendency to describe oneself in accordance with sex-typed standards of desirable behavior for men and women. Both in psychology and in society at large, masculinity and femininity have long been conceptualized as bipolar ends of a single continuum; accordingly, a person has had to be either masculine or feminine, but not both. This sex-role dichotomy has served to obscure two very plausible hypotheses: first, that many individuals might be androgynous; that is, they might be both masculine and feminine, both assertive and yielding, both instrumental and expressive—depending on the situational appropriateness of these vari-ous behaviors; and conversely, that strongly sex-typed individuals might be seriously lim-ited in the range of behaviors available to them as they move from situation to situa-tion. According to both Kagan (1964) and Kohlberg (1966), the highly sex-typed indi-vidual is motivated to keep his behavior con-sistent with an internalized sex-role standard, a goal that he presumably accomplishes by suppressing any behavior that might be con-sidered undesirable or inappropriate for his sex. Thus, whereas a narrowly masculine self-concept might inhibit behaviors that are stereotyped as feminine, and a narrowly femi-nine self-concept might inhibit behaviors that are stereotyped as masculine, a mixed, or!This research was supported by IROIMH 21735