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Definition
Sex role (or gender role) refers to the characteristics, expectations, and values associated with being male or female in a particular culture. Sex-role inventories have been designed to assess people’s endorsement of masculine and feminine characteristics.
Introduction
The first self-report to measure masculinity-femininity (M-F) was published in 1936 by Terman and Miles. It was tacitly assumed that masculinity was normal and natural in males, yet not in the case of females, and the parallel was held true for femininity (Ashmore 1990). This construct became popular and widespread in the field of psychology, and M-F scales were included in new omnibus personality inventories published in the following three decades. So far, a variety of instruments to evaluate sex roles and other gender-related constructs have been published in different countries across the world. This entry focuses on the one of the pioneering and most extensively used ones...
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References
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Matud, M. (2018). Sex-Role Inventory, The. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3394-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3394-1
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