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Sex Differences in Self-Esteem

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences
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Definition

Global self-esteem is defined as an individual’s subjective evaluation of his or her worth as a person (Leary and Baumeister 2000). This entry focuses on differences between men and women in self-esteem.

Introduction

There is widespread interest among academics as well as the general public in various aspects of self-esteem. One particularly interesting question is whether there is a difference in self-esteem between men and women.

Sex Differences in Self-Esteem

Many studies have examined gender and age differences in self-esteem. Although there were conflicting results in earlier studies in that some studies found higher self-esteem for men and other studies found no significant difference at all, several meta-analyses (e.g., Kling et al. 1999; Twenge and Campbell 2001) and recent longitudinal studies (e.g., Orth et al. 2010) suggest that men tend to have slightly higher self-esteem than women. However, the difference is rather small and not consistent across the life-span...

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References

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Correspondence to Ruth Yasemin Erol .

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Erol, R.Y. (2017). Sex Differences in Self-Esteem. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1181-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1181-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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