The relationship of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny to self-esteem

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Abstract
Advocates of androgyny suggest that the development of masculine and feminine characteristics in the one individual may point the way to healthy personality development. However, traditional approaches to masculinity‐femininity claim that strong same‐sex typing is the way to achieve this end. Two hundred and thirty‐seven subjects completed three androgyny instruments, two “traditional” masculinity‐femininity instruments, and two measures of self‐esteem. Subjects were then classified separately into one of the five sex‐role categories of Bern (1974) and one of the four categories of Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp (1975) by each of the five sex‐role instruments. For both sexes, both measures of self‐esteem, both methods of sex‐role classification, and all sex‐role instruments, self‐esteem generally increased from the feminine to the masculine categories, with masculine persons higher in self‐esteem than androgynes in almost every case. For both sexes masculinity also revealed significantly positive correlations with self‐esteem; correlations with femininity were nominal or slightly negative. Regression analyses corroborated these findings and indicated that traditional measures scored for masculinity added little to the predictive power of the masculinity scales of the androgyny instruments. However, self‐esteem was equally well predicted from the femininity scales of both the traditional and androgyny measures.