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Bem Sex Role Inventory Essay

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The Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI; Bem, 1974) has been the focus of numerous studies during the past forty years. There has been widespread interest in the concept of gender role orientation and the potential role of masculinity and femininity in the social and psychological lives of men and women. Moreover, the BSRI was an attempt to measure the concepts of masculinity and femininity as unidimensional and orthogonal constructs. Based on this assumption, the construction of the BSRI included a separate Masculine scale and a separate Feminine scale, which Bem (1974) defined on the basis of college students ratings of the desirability of sixty traits in the American society.
Bem (1981a) contended that the BSRI is "based on theory about both the cognitive processing and the motivational dynamics of sex-typed and androgynous individuals" (p. 10). These concepts provided the basis for the development of Bem's gender schema theory, the main tenet of which is that "sex-typing is derived, in part, from a readiness on the part of the individual to encode and to organize information – including information about the self – in terms of the cultural definitions of maleness and femaleness that constitute the society's gender schema" (Bem, 1981b, p. 369).
According to Bem (1987), a sex-typed individual is someone whose …show more content…

Third, although the BSRI is a measure of personality, the differentiation of masculine and feminine items is based on sex stereotypes of social desirability. As sex stereotypes vary among cultures as do the evaluations (importance and desirability) of masculine and feminine characteristics, it is questionable that the three-factor solution would be consistently replicated in a cross-cultural context. Along these lines, this article seeks to examine the cross-cultural validity of the original, long version of the BSRI (Bem, 1974) in two different countries, namely Bahrain and

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