Bem Sex Role Inventory

1. Abstract

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) is an influential psychometric instrument developed by social psychologist Sandra Lipsitz Bem in 1974. Designed to operationalize and assess gender role orientation and psychological androgyny, the instrument fundamentally challenged the long-standing bipolar assumption that masculinity and femininity exist as mutually exclusive, opposite poles on a single continuum. The standard BSRI consists of 60 self-descriptive personality traits: 20 culturally defined masculine attributes (tapping agency and instrumentality), 20 culturally defined feminine attributes (tapping communion and expressiveness), and 20 gender-neutral social desirability filler items. Respondents evaluate each descriptor on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (never or almost never true) to 7 (almost always true).

Psychometrically, the BSRI enables individuals to be scored independently on both masculinity and femininity dimensions, allowing respondents to be classified into four distinct gender-role categories via median-split methodology: Masculine (high masculinity, low femininity), Feminine (high femininity, low masculinity), Androgynous (high masculinity, high femininity), and Undifferentiated (low masculinity, low femininity). Across numerous cross-cultural and longitudinal investigations, the BSRI scales demonstrate robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging from .75 to .87 for Masculinity and .78 to .86 for Femininity) and high test-retest reliability (Pearson r > .85 over four-week intervals). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses consistently substantiate the two primary orthognal dimensions of instrumentality and expressiveness, validating its utility across clinical, developmental, social, and organizational psychological research.

2. Keywords

Bem Sex Role Inventory, BSRI, psychological androgyny, gender schema theory, masculinity, femininity, instrumentality, expressiveness, gender role orientation, psychometrics, sex-typing

3. Authors

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory was developed by Sandra Lipsitz Bem, Ph.D. (June 22, 1944 – April 8, 2014), an American psychologist known for her pioneering work in gender studies, feminist psychology, and cognitive developmental psychology.

• Primary Affiliation during Development: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States.
• Subsequent Affiliation: Department of Psychology and Department of Women’s Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States (where she served as Professor of Psychology and Director of the Women’s Studies Program).
• Historical Correspondence & Archives: Sandra Bem’s scholarly papers and archival records are preserved within the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY. Current commercial licensing and formal psychometric distribution are administered through Mind Garden, Inc.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory is to provide an empirical, psychometrically sound method for assessing psychological gender orientation as a dual-axis, non-bipolar construct. Before Bem’s landmark 1974 publication, psychological instruments—such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) Masculinity-Femininity (Mf) scale and the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) Femininity scale—treated masculinity and femininity as opposite ends of a single, zero-sum continuum. Under that historical paradigm, an endorsement of masculine traits inherently denoted a lack of feminine traits, and any deviation from traditional sex-congruent typing was frequently pathologized as developmental arrest or psychological maladjustment.

Bem developed the BSRI to operationalize the revolutionary concept of psychological androgyny: the notion that a single individual can independently endorse and integrate both masculine (instrumental, assertive, self-reliant) and feminine (expressive, nurturant, interpersonal) behavioral characteristics depending on the situational demands. The clinical, developmental, and social applications of the scale include:

• Assessing Behavioral and Psychological Flexibility: Bem hypothesized and empirically demonstrated that sex-typed individuals are cognitively constrained by gender stereotyping, whereas psychologically androgynous individuals exhibit superior behavioral flexibility, situational adaptability, and higher self-esteem across interpersonal and task-oriented domains.
• Clinical and Counseling Assessment: In clinical settings, the inventory assists therapists in identifying rigid gender-role stereotyping, internalized societal pressures, and gender identity conflicts that may correlate with depressive symptoms, interpersonal friction, perfectionism, or communication deficits.
• Organizational and Leadership Studies: The instrument is widely applied in industrial-organizational psychology to examine leadership styles, managerial stereotyping, transformational leadership paradigms, and workplace role adaptability.
• Developmental and Social Science Research: Researchers use the BSRI to analyze socialization processes, parenting behaviors, cross-cultural shifts in gender role perceptions, and the longitudinal evolution of social identity across diverse cohorts.

5. Psychological Construct

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory measures three distinct dimensions: Masculinity (instrumentality), Femininity (expressiveness), and Social Desirability / Neutrality.

Masculinity (Instrumentality / Agency)

The Masculinity dimension assesses self-perceived traits that reflect societal standards of agency, self-assertion, goal-directed behavior, and decisiveness. In Bem’s original normative research, these traits were established as significantly more desirable in American society for a man than for a woman. Key descriptors include defends own beliefs, independent, assertive, strong personality, forceful, analytical, has leadership ability, and willing to take risks. This dimension evaluates an individual’s tendency to function autonomously, navigate competitive environments, assert control, and act as an active agent in task-focused contexts.

Femininity (Expressiveness / Communion)

The Femininity dimension captures personality traits that reflect societal standards of interpersonal communion, emotional warmth, relational sensitivity, and affective care. In the original normative development, these traits were validated as significantly more desirable for a woman than for a man. Representative items include yielding, cheerful, affectionate, flatterable, sympathetic, sensitive to the needs of others, understanding, compassionate, eager to soothe hurt feelings, and gentle. This dimension reflects an individual’s interpersonal connectedness, capacity for empathy, social responsiveness, and emotional supportiveness.

Social Desirability (Neutrality)

The Neutrality dimension consists of 20 traits that are judged by cultural raters to be equally desirable for both men and women (e.g., helpful, conscientious, truthful, adaptable, friendly, reliable, tactful) or equally undesirable (e.g., moody, unpredictable, jealous, conceited). These items function primarily as psychometric control markers to detect general response acquiescence or extreme social desirability bias, ensuring that self-ratings on the substantive masculinity and femininity subscales are not merely reflective of generalized positive self-evaluation.

The Four-Fold Typology

By computing separate mean scores for Masculinity and Femininity and applying a median-split technique (or normative cutoffs), individuals are categorized into one of four gender-role classifications:

• Androgynous: High Masculinity (above median) and High Femininity (above median). Individuals integrate both instrumental and expressive strengths, facilitating flexible responses to varying situational challenges.
• Masculine (Sex-Typed Male / Cross-Sex-Typed Female): High Masculinity (above median) and Low Femininity (below median). Orientation dominated by assertive, independent, and instrumental attributes.
• Feminine (Sex-Typed Female / Cross-Sex-Typed Male): High Femininity (above median) and Low Masculinity (below median). Orientation characterized by nurturance, empathy, and affective sensitivity.
• Undifferentiated: Low Masculinity (below median) and Low Femininity (below median). Low self-endorsement across both instrumental and expressive competencies, historically linked in psychological literature to lower self-esteem and reduced behavioral self-efficacy.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the BSRI is anchored in two foundational concepts: Dual-Axis Orthogonality and Bem’s subsequent Gender Schema Theory (Bem, 1981).

Critique of the Unidimensional Bipolar Model

For decades, psychometric personality research relied on the unidimensional construct pioneered by Terman and Miles (1936), wherein masculinity and femininity represented antithetical poles. In 1973, psychologist Anne Constantinople published a landmark theoretical critique arguing that the bipolar assumption lacked empirical foundation and conflated multiple cognitive and behavioral domains. Simultaneously, Robert Bakan (1966) conceptualized human existence through two fundamental modalities: agency (the drive toward individual differentiation, mastery, and autonomy) and communion (the drive toward integration, connection, and harmony). Drawing from these perspectives, Bem asserted that agency and communion—operationalized as masculinity and femininity—can and do coexist independently within an individual’s personality structure.

Gender Schema Theory

In 1981, Bem extended the theoretical foundation of the BSRI by introducing Gender Schema Theory, a cognitive framework explaining sex-typing as a learned readiness to process incoming information through a gender-based lens. Bem posited that:

• Cognitive Gender Schemas: Society instills a generalized network of gender-linked associations. A gender-schematic individual automatically perceives, categorizes, and organizes reality—including behaviors, careers, emotions, and self-evaluations—in terms of cultural definitions of male and female.
• Sex-Typed Individuals: Highly sex-typed men and women are schematic; they assimilate their self-concept into their gender schema, readily accepting culturally congruent traits and actively repressing counter-stereotypic behaviors.
• Androgynous and Undifferentiated Individuals: In contrast, androgynous individuals are gender-aschematic. When faced with novel information or social tasks, they do not automatically filter reality through the lens of gender appropriateness; instead, they select responses based on pragmatism, personal preference, and situational efficacy.

7. Validity

The validity of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory has been extensively investigated over five decades of international research across developmental, social, and clinical domains.

Construct and Criterion Validity

During original scale development, Bem (1974) validated trait items using independent samples of undergraduate judges (100 Stanford students: 50 male, 50 female) who rated how desirable each personality trait was for an adult American male or adult American female. A trait was retained on the Masculinity scale only if it was judged significantly more desirable for a man than for a woman (p < .05), and on the Femininity scale only if judged significantly more desirable for a woman than for a man (p < .05). Items qualifying as neutral exhibited non-significant differences between male and female desirability ratings.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity has been evaluated against alternative sex-role measures, most notably the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ; Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1974). Correlations between the BSRI Masculinity scale and the PAQ Instrumental scale routinely exceed .70 to .80, while correlations between the BSRI Femininity scale and the PAQ Expressive scale consistently fall between .65 and .75. Crucially, discriminant validity between the BSRI Masculinity and Femininity subscales is demonstrated by their near-zero empirical correlation across large non-clinical samples (typically r = -.05 to .12), confirming that the two constructs operate orthogonally rather than antagonistically.

Predictive and Behavioral Validity

Bem’s initial behavioral investigations (Bem, 1975; Bem & Lenney, 1976) substantiated the predictive validity of the scale. In empirical laboratory paradigms involving conformist pressures (Asch-type paradigms) and nurturance tasks (e.g., interacting with a baby or showing empathy to an emotionally distressed peer), androgynous individuals consistently performed with high competence in both agentic (resisting social conformity) and communal (nurturing the infant, offering comfort) domains. In contrast, sex-typed individuals systematically avoided cross-sex-typed behaviors even when financial incentives were introduced.

8. Reliability

The BSRI demonstrates strong psychometric reliability across internal consistency and temporal stability metrics.

Internal Consistency

In Sandra Bem’s original 1974 normative standardization sample of 917 college students (Stanford University and Foothill Community College), the inventory exhibited high internal consistency:

• Masculinity Scale: Cronbach’s alpha was computed at α = .86 for males and α = .86 for females.
• Femininity Scale: Cronbach’s alpha was computed at α = .80 for males and α = .82 for females.
• Social Desirability (Neutrality) Scale: Cronbach’s alpha ranged from α = .70 to α = .75 across cohorts.

Subsequent meta-analyses and large-sample evaluations (e.g., Choi & Fuqua, 2003) have corroborated these coefficients across adult community samples, with internal consistency values consistently clustering between .78 and .88 for Masculinity and between .77 and .86 for Femininity.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability was originally examined using a subset of the normative sample re-administered the inventory four weeks after baseline testing. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients indicated exceptionally high stability:

• Masculinity Scale test-retest reliability: r = .90 (p < .001).
• Femininity Scale test-retest reliability: r = .90 (p < .001).
• Social Desirability Scale test-retest reliability: r = .89 (p < .001).

Longer-interval stability studies spanning six months to two years continue to demonstrate moderate-to-high coefficients (typically r = .60 to .75), reflecting both trait-like durability and responsiveness to major developmental and life transitions.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the BSRI has been the subject of extensive psychometric investigation using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Exploratory Factor Structure

Early factor analyses (e.g., Gaudreau, 1977; Moreland et al., 1978; Pedhazur & Tetenbaum, 1979) supported the presence of two dominant factors corresponding to Instrumentality and Expressiveness, but identified multidimensional sub-factors within each primary domain. Specifically:

• The Masculinity items routinely split into two core sub-components: Leadership / Dominance (e.g., dominant, acts as a leader, has leadership ability, forceful) and Autonomy / Self-Reliance (e.g., self-reliant, independent, self-sufficient).
• The Femininity items frequently load onto Interpersonal Warmth / Nurturance (e.g., tender, compassionate, warm, affectionate) and Affective Submissiveness (e.g., yielding, shy, soft-spoken, gullible).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and the Short BSRI

Because several original items (such as yielding, gullible, childlike, and athletic) displayed low factor loadings (< .30) or cross-loadings in diverse cultural groups, Bem (1981) developed the Short-Form BSRI (30 items total: 10 masculine, 10 feminine, 10 neutral). CFA investigations of the short form (e.g., Choi, Fuqua, & Newman, 2007) demonstrate superior fit indices compared to the full 60-item instrument, with Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) values consistently ≤ .06, Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .92, and Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .90, confirming the structural validity of two clean, orthogonal latent factors.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report psychological assessment / Personality trait inventory.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically aged 16 and older).
• Administration Format: Individual or group paper-and-pencil questionnaire, or computerized/online administration.
• Item Count: 60 items total (20 Masculine, 20 Feminine, 20 Neutral/Social Desirability).
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type rating format:
• 1 = Never or almost never true
• 2 = Usually not true
• 3 = Sometimes but infrequently true
• 4 = Occasionally true
• 5 = Often true
• 6 = Usually true
• 7 = Almost always true
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Scoring and Classification Protocol:
• Masculinity Score: Calculate the sum of ratings for the 20 masculine items and divide by 20 (score range: 1.00 to 7.00).
• Femininity Score: Calculate the sum of ratings for the 20 feminine items and divide by 20 (score range: 1.00 to 7.00).
• Neutrality Score: Calculate the sum of ratings for the 20 neutral items and divide by 20.
• Median-Split Typology: Scores are compared against sample or published median normative splits (historically, median Masc ≈ 4.95; median Fem ≈ 4.90 for original college cohorts):
• Androgynous: High Masculinity (≥ median) and High Femininity (≥ median).
• Masculine: High Masculinity (≥ median) and Low Femininity (< median).
• Feminine: Low Masculinity (< median) and High Femininity (≥ median).
• Undifferentiated: Low Masculinity (< median) and Low Femininity (< median).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory was originally published in 1974 by Sandra L. Bem in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. While academic researchers have historically accessed the published item lists for non-commercial scholarly inquiries, formal commercial copyright and psychometric distribution rights are owned and administered by Mind Garden, Inc.

• Initial Publication Year: 1974 (Standard 60-item form); 1981 (Revised Manual and Short Form).
• Commercial Distributor: Mind Garden, Inc., 855 Oak Grove Ave., Suite 215, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA.
• Licensing and Fee Structure: Non-commercial student and academic research licenses can be obtained from Mind Garden, Inc., which offers discounted per-copy assessment permissions and research licenses. Commercial organizational use, clinical practice use, and large-scale digital deployments require formal paid licensing.
• Open Science / Fair Use: While public domain listings of the descriptive adjectives exist widely in scholarly literature, using the official manual, standardized norms, and validated scoring keys for clinical or commercial diagnosis requires authorized clearance from the copyright holder.

12. References

• Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: An essay on psychology and religion. Rand McNally.
• Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0036215
• Bem, S. L. (1975). Sex role adaptability: One consequence of psychological androgyny. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31(4), 634–643. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077098
• Bem, S. L. (1981). Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review, 88(4), 354–364. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.88.4.354
• Bem, S. L., & Lenney, E. (1976). Sex typing and the avoidance of cross-sex behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33(1), 48–54. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.33.1.48
• Choi, N., & Fuqua, D. R. (2003). The structure of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory: A review. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 63(5), 872–887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164403256372
• Choi, N., Fuqua, D. R., & Newman, J. L. (2007). Hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Sex Roles, 58(1–2), 72–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-007-9327-0
• Constantinople, A. (1973).史Masculinity-femininity: An exception to a famous dictum? Psychological Bulletin, 80(5), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0035334
• Gaudreau, P. (1977). Factor analysis of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 45(2), 299–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.45.2.299
• Pedhazur, E. J., & Tetenbaum, T. J. (1979). Bem Sex Role Inventory: A theoretical and methodological critique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 996–1016. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.6.996
• Spence, J. T., Helmreich, R., & Stapp, J. (1974). Ratings of self and peers on sex role attributes and their relation to self-esteem and conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(1), 29–39. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0076857

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)