Working mothers, sex differences, and self-esteem in college students' self-descriptions

Gender role identity and gender intensification: Agency and communion in adolescents’ spontaneous self-descriptions

“…Even though girls' self-descriptions included attributes referring to their relationships with other people (e.g., helpful, sensitive, communicative) or other living beings (e.g., animals), and boys described themselves more individualistically (e.g., cool, intelligent) or in relation to objects and interests more frequently than girls did, one cannot ignore the fact that gender differences emerged in only 17.4% of the named attributes. Moreover, more than one-third of the attributes named by adolescents in our study were neutral, indicating that adolescent boys and girls not only describe themselves similarly (Wise & Joy, 1982), but also in a not particularly stereotypical way when an openended format is used (Cowan & Stewart, 1977;Jackson, 1985). This pattern is in line with a recent meta-analysis showing declines in the use of expressive and instrumental traits in students' self-descriptions (Donnelly & Twenge, 2017).…”

“…Existing findings on gender self-stereotyping using the spontaneous self-description method are heterogeneous. Some studies have confirmed the stereotypical gender gaps in agency and communion (Diehl et al, 2004), whereas others have found that women and men did not describe themselves in a stereotypical manner when an open-ended answering format was applied (Cowan & Stewart, 1977;Jackson, 1985;Uchronski, 2008;Wise & Joy, 1982). In one of the rare studies using an open-ended format with adolescents, McGuire and McGuire (1982) found that girls' selfconceptions were more communal than boys'.…”