Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Sex differences in masculine/feminine behaviour: When you look at masculine behaviour alone (top), there's a lot of overlap between the sexes, ditto feminine (right); but when you look at both traits at once (scatterplot), there's much less overlap

Understanding the Magnitude of Psychological Differences Between  Women and Men Requires Seeing the Forest and the Trees. Alice H. Eagly and William Revelle. Perspectives in Psychological Science, in press. Oct 2021. https://personality-project.org/revelle/publications/eagly.revelle.21.pdf

Abstract: Whether women and men are psychologically very similar or quite different is a contentious  issue in psychological science. This article clarifies this issue by demonstrating that larger and  smaller sex/gender differences can reflect differing ways of organizing the same data. For single  psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ  by sex/gender to produce scales of a construct’s overall typicality for women versus men. For example, averaging self-ratings on personality traits more typical of women or men yields much larger sex/gender differences on measures of the femininity or masculinity of personality. Sex/gender differences on such broad-gauge, thematic variables are large relative to differences on their component indicators. This increased effect magnitude for aggregated scales reflects gains in both their reliability and validity as indicators of sex/gender. In addition, in  psychological domains such as vocational interests that are composed of many variables, at least  some of which differ by sex/gender, the multivariate distance between women and men is typically larger than the differences on the component variables. These analyses encourage recognition of the interdependence of sex/gender similarity and difference in psychological data. 

Keywords: sex differences, gender differences, effect magnitude, gender similarity hypothesis,  femininity, masculinity







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