Bem Sex-Role Inventory

Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), test used to measure an individual’s femininity and masculinity. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is one of the most widely used tools in research on gender roles.

Construction of the BSRI

In 1974 American psychologist Sandra L. Bem, a proponent of androgyny theory, recognized that an individual could express both feminine and masculine characteristics and constructed a sex-role inventory. Bem intended her inventory to represent two fully independent scales of culturally defined masculinity and culturally defined femininity.

To develop the inventory, Bem compiled a list of 200 personality characteristics that seemed positively valued and stereotypically masculine or feminine, as well as 200 gender-neutral characteristics (seemingly neither masculine nor feminine). Of the latter characteristics, half were positively valued, and half were negatively valued. Bem distributed the list of 400 items to two samples of undergraduate students at Stanford University. In each sample, half of the subjects of each sex rated each characteristic in terms of its sex-typed social desirability for a man, and the other half of the subjects rated each characteristic in terms of its desirability for a woman. The rating scale ranged from “Not at all desirable” to “Extremely desirable.” Personality characteristics that were judged as more desirable for a man than for a woman or more desirable for a woman than for a man qualified for inclusion in the masculinity and femininity scales, respectively. Of those eligible items, 20 were selected for each scale. For instance, “aggressive” and “analytical” were associated with masculinity, while “moody” and “happy” were associated with femininity. Personality characteristics that were judged as no more desirable for one sex than the other qualified for inclusion in the social desirability scale. Of those, 10 positive and 10 negative characteristics were chosen (e.g., “gullible” and “cheerful”).

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The BSRI takes about 15 minutes to complete. Respondents indicate how well each item describes themselves, from 1 (“Never or almost never true”) to 7 (“Always or almost always true”). The masculinity score is the average of the ratings on the 20 masculine items, and the femininity score is the average of the ratings on the 20 feminine items. The scoring of the BSRI by design does not treat the masculine and feminine items as clustering at opposite ends of a linear continuum; rather, they are treated as measures of two independent scales. Subsequent analyses by Bem and others have supported the claim that masculinity and femininity are logically and empirically independent.

In addition to noting that some individuals were exclusively feminine or masculine, Bem also found that some individuals have balanced levels of traits from both scales. She described those individuals as androgynous. Despite subsequent usage, Bem’s original definition of androgyny was that androgynous persons possess relatively equal levels of masculinity and femininity as measured by the BSRI, not that they possess high scores on both scales.

Technical critiques

Although the BSRI generally is accepted as the standard by which other sex-typed personality instruments are evaluated, the test has been criticized on technical and theoretical grounds. Specifically, American psychologist Janet Spence argued that the terms masculinity and femininity are inappropriate for labeling the scales, as they assess only instrumentality and expressiveness. Masculinity and femininity as concepts are much more complex and include many components not measured by the BSRI, including attitudes toward women and men and actual behaviours.

Further, while Bem intended to measure two distinct factors, Spence argued that in reality Bem’s measures yielded one continuum. In this continuum, those who are strongly sex-typed in their self-images and role identification (masculine men and feminine women) are clustered at one extreme. At the other end of the continuum are those who are not sex-typed, identifying with neither the masculine nor the feminine characteristics measured by the BSRI. In addition, Spence argued that the use of characteristics “typical” of women and men to construct inventories to measure femininity and masculinity reified perceived differences between women and men, in that the use of the scales masks the fact that few women or men actually exhibit all or most of the characteristics within each of the respective scales.

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Uses in gender research

Scholars used the BSRI as a predictor of adult mental health, parental behaviours, marital intimacy, marital satisfaction, and division of household behaviour. BSRI scales were also incorporated into research modeling the extent to which individuals engage in stereotypically feminine and masculine behaviours. In addition, Bem utilized the BSRI in the construction of her gender schema theory, which proposes that sex typing results in part from the adaptation of one’s self-concept to the gender schema. The gender schema is the structure of spontaneously sorting people, characteristics, and behaviours into feminine and masculine categories. The BSRI measures the extent to which individuals spontaneously organize information, especially about the self, on the basis of gender and thus is a key component of gender schema theory.

The BSRI remained a valid tool in social psychological research in the early 21st century, despite concerns about changing perceptions of masculine and feminine gender roles. Awareness of the BSRI’s potential weakening drew attention to the need for subsequent validation in the future.