Gender Specificity of the Self-Image of Modern Young People

Abstract

The study of the self-image and its gender specificity is presented in the article. It is stated that gender socialization, having global changes in terms of modern social and cultural transformations, is one of the components of the positive or negative gender identity, which is in turn correlated with self-image, understood as a set of the depth of self-knowledge (cognitive component), self-relation (affective component) and the relevance consistency of behavior patterns (behavior component). There are 38 women and 9 men who took part in our research, aged between 18-28 years. Among them, there are 21 participants with the harmonical gender identity, 13 participants with the androgyny and 13 participants with the disharmonic gender identity (such as gender-unidentified men and women, masculine women and feminine men). It is shown that androgyne participants have the independent (II) type of interpersonal relationship and the lowest level of internal conflictness. The group with the disharmonic gender identity shows the aggressive (III) type of interpersonal relationship. The group with the harmonical gender identity shows the dependent (VI) type of interpersonal relationship. The results illustrate the correlation between gender socialization and the positive selfimage.