The subject of gender in adulthood is, on its face, too large for a single chapter. In an attempt to define it so that it is feasible to address, we narrow our focus to three broad issues: gender and lifespan developmental approaches to studying adult personality; gender and the aging mind and body across adulthood; and the implications of gendered social roles for adult development and aging. We chose these issues for several reasons.First, we wanted to highlight the differences between a "lifespan developmental" approach to understanding gender in adulthood and an "aging" approach (see also Elder & Shanahan, 2006;Fuller-Iglesias, Antonucci, & Smith, 2008). The first emphasizes growth across the lifespan, often includes qualitatively distinct periods or stages, and does not focus on decline or decrements. This approach emphasizes ways that adults of different ages (e.g., in their 20s vs. their 40s) may differ from each other in important ways. The second approach nearly always includes attention to processes of decline and decrements in functioning, but also increasingly notes functions that do not decline or that might even increase. These two approaches are both important and have both been used to study some phenomena, but in many cases only one of them has been employed. For that reason, we have quite different impressions of aging itself according to these different views, and those differences have consequences for our understanding of gender. For example, personality has been examined most thoroughly in developmental terms in adulthood, is often understood in terms of continuities or lack of change, but has rarely been examined in terms of decline or "aging." In contrast, the cognitive and physical changes associated with adulthood are nearly always conceptualized in terms of broad processes rather than stages and, indeed, usually in terms of decline. Individual researchers who take both approaches to understanding gender in adulthood have advocated attention to contextual issues such as culture, class, or race/ethnicity, but most research has failed to incorporate it. We examine social roles as one set of contextual issues that have been studied in some depth and are often gendered, though men and women both occupy many of them.Finally, in this chapter we pay attention to those aspects of the psychology of adult persons that seem to be inflected by gender, though we note with interest areas where there has been little research. We assume that some aspects of adult psychology are general to both women and men (e.g., that responsibilities for work and other people generally increase until old age, that there is a switch in focus to "time left" after mid-life), and we do not focus on those. Instead we consider evidence that gender matters in certain psychological experiences of adulthood in the three areas mentioned above: personality, cognitive and physical changes, and social roles. Thus, for example, A