OPINION: In the late 1960s, hospital-based researchers in Massachusetts conducted a study asking mental health clinicians to describe what they considered the characteristics of a psychologically healthy man, a psychologically healthy woman, and a psychologically healthy adult “sex unspecified”. The clinicians had to do this by rating each on a set of bipolar attributes (eg, “very passive” vs “very active”, or “tactful” vs “blunt”) that they thought were sex-stereotypical. For example, they deemed it desirable for a man to be “very active”, and desirable for a woman to be “tactful”.
The punch line was as predictable as it was depressing: the clinicians described the psychologically healthy man more positively overall than the woman, and described the psychologically healthy “sex unspecified” adult using the attributes most commonly associated with the healthy man. It was, for these practitioners, psychologically healthier to be a man.
“Well, duh,” you might say. “I’ve seen Mad Men; the 1960s were designed to make women nuts.” And maybe you’re right.
The polarised view of gender certainly grated with Sandra Lipsitz Bem. In the mid-1960s, during her last year at Carnegie Mellon University, Lipsitz had met and married Daryl Bem, on the condition that their marriage would be egalitarian in every way. It did not seem inevitable to her that women must by definition be less psychologically well adjusted.
In 1970, she and Bem wrote an article called “Training the woman to know her place: the power of a nonconscious ideology”, in which they argued that society indoctrinated women into the role and characteristics expected of them, both creating and maintaining gender-based hierarchies. They used the word “sexism” which, to my surprise, I discovered dates back to only about 1965.
Four years later, Lipsitz Bem designed the Bem Sex Role Inventory, and used it to test her ideas about psychological wellbeing. The BSRI asks people to indicate how well a set of traditionally desirable masculine and feminine traits described them. Importantly, and somewhat contradictory to the thinking at the time, Lipsitz Bem conceived of masculinity and femininity not as opposite ends of a continuum but as independent sets of characteristics. So a person could be both masculine and feminine, which she classed as “androgynous”, or a lot of one and not much of the other. Being highly feminine, for example, didn’t automatically mean the person was not masculine.
Theoretically, Lipsitz Bem believed that masculinity and femininity were gender roles – roles we’re trained, but not doomed, to act out. She argued that endorsing masculine and feminine traits equally would be a good thing. If you’re in a situation that requires being assertive, you’ll have the tools for the job, and the same applies if nurturance is the spanner you need in a different situation. Traditionally, sex-typed folks (masculine men and feminine women) aren’t the same kind of Swiss Army Knife.
And there is some reason to think that this is the case, though Lipsitz Bem did have to subsequently revise her predictions to clarify that this flexibility applies only when people are both highly masculine and feminine – research had shown there was a small group of “undifferentiated” folks who didn’t identify with either set of traits.
I won’t pretend that research consensually shows “androgynous” to be a good thing, though. One of the issues with having a Swiss Army Knife is it takes longer to choose the right tool for the job, and research suggests some find this harder than others.
It’s interesting looking back on this research and the history around it, particularly in the increasingly binary-resisting world we live in. Before you dismiss Lipsitz Bem’s work as ancient history, note that her BSRI is still heavily used today – Google Scholar identifies more than 7000 references to it since 2019 alone.
But I find myself wondering, if she were developing her scale now, would she use the same attributes to describe masculine and feminine stereotypes? Snips and snails and puppy dogs’ tails?
