ne of the many questions explored by Janet Taylor Spence and 0 her colleagues concerns the relationships among gender, selfesteem, and so-called "masculine" agentic personality characteristics and "feminine" communal personality characteristics. In what has been considered a surprising finding, Spence's research indicates that the same relationships are typically observed in both men and women: Possession of masculine attributes is substantially and positively correlated with self-esteem, whereas possession of feminine attributes tends to have a minimal relationship with self-esteem (e.g., Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1975). One implication of this finding is that men might be higher than women in global self-esteem by virtue of their superiority in masculine attributes. Yet, despite thousands of articles related to gender and self-esteem that have appeared in the scholarly journals, no one has yet to offer a definitive answer to the seemingly simple question, Are men and women different in global self-esteem?Global self-esteem is widely regarded by many psychologists as one of the most important determinants of personal well-being and ad-Preparation of this chapter was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9596226.