more a person was of one, the less he or she was of the other. Each of us can
be placed on this continuum, with very masculine and very feminine peopleon the extremes and those who are both, but not much of either, toward
the middle.
The second assumption was that the more people ’s gender-role behavior
matched the stereotype for their gender, the more psychologically healthy they
were. Masculine men and feminine women were considered well adjusted.
But a man who acted too much the way society said a woman was supposedto act or a woman who behaved too much like a stereotypic man was said
to have adjustment problems. One of the original scales on the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the Mf (Masculinity-Femininity)Scale. Initially researchers maintained that scoring too far on the wrong side
of this scale for one ’s gender was indicative of psychological disturbances.
Androgyny
Investigators soon uncovered several problems with the masculinity –femininity
model (Constantinople, 1973). In response, psychologists developed a new
approach for measuring and identifying gender-role behaviors. The mostinfluential of these new approaches is called the androgyny model (Bem,
1974, 1977). Coupled with society ’s rising concern for women ’s issues during
these years, the androgyny model triggered an explosion in research on genderroles. The model begins by rejecting the notion that masculinity and femininity
are opposites on a single continuum. Instead, masculinity and femininity are
seen as independent traits. People can be high on both traits, on only onetrait, or on neither. Further, because these traits are independent, knowing
that someone is high in masculinity tells us nothing about how feminine that
person is.
A great deal of research supports the notion that masculinity and femi-
ninity are best thought of as independent concepts. For example, researchers
find that women tend to increase in both masculinity and femininity as they
move through their middle adult years (Kasen, Chen, Sneed, Crawford, &
Cohen, 2006; Strough, Leszczynski, Neely, Flinn, & Margrett, 2007). This pat-
tern would not be possible if masculinity and femininity were opposite poles on
a single dimension.
The androgyny model also challenges the assumption that a person ’s gen-
der should match his or her gender type. Advocates of the model maintainthat the most well-adjusted person is both masculine and feminine; that is, an-
drogynous. According to this perspective, people who are only masculine or
only feminine often find they lack the ability to engage in adaptive behavior.Masculine people do well as long as the situation calls for a masculine re-
sponse, such as asserting one ’s rights or taking over the leadership of a group.
But when masculine individuals are called on to act in a traditionally feminine
manner, such as showing compassion or sensitivity, they falter. A well-
adjusted person must have the flexibility to engage in masculine behaviors
when the situation demands and in feminine behaviors when those are mostappropriate.
Psychologists soon developed scales to measure the traits of masculinity
and femininity separately (Bem, 1974; Lenney, 1991; Spence, Helmreich,Individual Differences in Gender-Role Behavior 379