MEN’S FEMININITY AND DOMINANCE ACROSS THE LIFESPAN: COHORT SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN LIFESPAN TRAJECTORIES

摘要

Men low in femininity and high in dominance may be said to adhere to the traditional male gender role (Helson & Soto, 2005). Developmental theory (Gutmann, 1994) and American sociocultural changes after 1970 (Strough et al., 2007) suggest all men will increase in FM and decrease in DO with age, but that younger cohorts will be more FM and less DO than older cohorts. Here we employ data from the Intergenerational Studies (IGS; Eichorn, 1981), focusing on original IGS men participants (born in the 1920s; N=147) and sons of original participants (born in the 1950s; N=172). The older cohort provides a maximum of 5 waves of data (30s through their 80s); the younger cohort provides a maximum of 3 waves of data (20s through their 60s). We explore developmental trajectories of femininity (FM) and dominance (DO), assessed via the California Psychological Inventory (Gough & Bradley, 1996), with a simultaneous focus on development, cohort, and family. Three-level longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling (HLM; Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992) analyses indicate both younger and older cohort men remain stable and similar in level of FM across the lifespan. In contrast, the two cohorts significantly differ both in terms of DO intercept and slope. The older cohort enters young adulthood significantly more DO than the younger cohort and remains stable across the entire lifespan; the younger cohort enters young adulthood significantly less DO but significantly increases in DO across the entire lifespan. Results illustrate the complexities of development in the context of historical time.