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Shifting Roles: How Gender Norms Have Evolved Between Agency and Communion
Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 6: Gender, Race, and Reducing PrejudiceSection 6.3 · lesson 35 of 8510 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Two axes, seven decades of data, and change that is real but uneven.
- Define agency and communion, and locate Bem's androgyny
- Outline social role theory and role congruity theory
- Summarize what changed across the twentieth century, and what did not
- Explain the asymmetric pace of change through precarious manhood
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Gender, Race, and Reducing Prejudice
Shifting Roles
Gender roles have changed enormously in living memory. That much is not in dispute. What is worth getting right is which parts changed, and which did not. This section gives you the two axes that organize the whole literature. Agency, and communion. Then Eagly's theory of where gender stereotypes come from in the first place. And a seven-decade meta-analysis that tests its central prediction. The result is a split, and the split is the interesting part. Then we ask why change has been so asymmetric between women and men. The answer involves a theory about how manhood is culturally held.
Bakan, 1966
Two Latent Dimensions
Two latent dimensions emerge repeatedly from research on gender stereotypes. David Bakan named them in nineteen sixty-six. Agency covers assertiveness and independence. Also instrumental competence, and achievement orientation. Communion covers warmth and interpersonal sensitivity. Also nurturance, and concern for others. The masculine stereotype loads heavily on agency. The feminine stereotype loads heavily on communion. That structure is empirically robust across measures and across decades. Though the specific traits placed on each pole do shift over time. Distinguish those two things carefully. A finding that the traits changed is not a finding that the axes changed.
Bem, 1974
Making the Axes Independent
Sandra Bem did something structurally important in nineteen seventy-four. Her Bem Sex Role Inventory operationalized the two dimensions independently. Before that, masculinity and femininity were treated as opposite poles of one scale. Score high on one, and you scored low on the other by construction. Bem separated them, and that changed what was measurable. It permitted identifying androgynous individuals. People who score high on both dimensions at once. Two independent axes produce four positions, not two opposed types. High on both is androgyny, associated with cross-domain flexibility. High on agency alone, and high on communion alone, are the classic poles. And low on both is called undifferentiated. Neither dimension is central to that person's self-concept.
The Qualifications
What Survived, and What Did Not
Bem argued that androgyny had two benefits. Greater behavioral flexibility, and greater psychological well-being. Later work has been less kind to parts of that claim. The well-being claim in particular has been complicated. So treat the flexibility claim and the well-being claim separately. There is also a measurement critique worth knowing. The inventory's masculine items track agency. And its feminine items track communion. Better than either tracks masculinity and femininity as such. But notice why that critique is not fatal to the instrument. If the items measure agency and communion, they measure what actually varies. It is the label that was wrong, not the measurement. And the conceptual point survives intact. Gendered traits decompose into two relatively independent axes.
Eagly, 1987
Social Role Theory
So where do these stereotypes come from in the first place? Alice Eagly's social role theory, from nineteen eighty-seven, gives an answer. Gender stereotypes arise from the differential distribution of people across roles. Across social roles, specifically. Women have historically been concentrated in domestic and caregiving roles. Observers then infer that women possess the traits those roles require. Communal traits, in other words. And the same inference runs in the other direction for men. So the stereotype is a correspondence inference drawn from a social fact. It is not a discovery of intrinsic disposition. Now notice what that buys the theory. It makes a falsifiable prediction about the future. As women's role distribution shifts, stereotypes should shift in turn.
The Test
Seven Decades of Data
That prediction has been tested against a very large dataset. Eagly, Nater, Miller, Kaufmann, and Sczesny published the meta-analysis in twenty twenty. Seven decades of United States data. And the answer splits cleanly in two. For competence beliefs, the predicted pattern appeared. Women are now perceived as at least as competent as men. The role distribution shifted, and the stereotype followed it. For communion beliefs, something else happened entirely. Those beliefs continued to diverge. Women are perceived as more communal than ever. So one gap closed while the other one widened. That is partial support, and the failure is informative. Any complete account has to explain both halves of that result.
Eagly And Karau, 2002
Role Congruity Theory
Eagly and Karau extended social role theory in two thousand two. Role congruity theory explains prejudice against women in leadership. And it specifies two distinct forms of bias, which are often collapsed together. The first is descriptive incongruity. Women's perceived communal traits seem to mismatch the requirements of leadership. Leadership is read as requiring agency. That is a claim about capability. The second is injunctive incongruity. Agentic behavior by women violates norms that prescribe communion. That is a claim about permission, which is a different thing entirely. You need both, because they predict different failures. The first predicts she will not be selected. The second predicts she will be punished if she succeeds anyway. Together they produce the double bind from the previous section. Women must demonstrate competence, typically by behaving agentically. And are sanctioned for the very behavior that demonstrates it.
Scope
The Theory Generalizes
Role congruity theory has guided two decades of empirical work. And its reach turns out to be broader than female leadership. It has been extended to other counter-stereotypic role combinations. Men in nursing is one example. Women in STEM fields is another. In each case the same two incongruities apply. With the poles swapped around. And that generalization is itself the evidence for the theory. A framework that only explained its original case would be a description. The fact that swapping the poles predicts the pattern is what makes it a theory.
The Contemporary Picture
Three Patterns, One Uneven Story
Three patterns dominate the contemporary picture, and they do not agree. The first is convergence. Large convergence in education, and in labor force participation. And in perceptions of competence between women and men. Especially in wealthier democracies. The second is asymmetric expansion of permissible behavior. Women are now widely expected to be agentic in addition to communal. Expectations of communion in men have grown only modestly. The third is stickiness in the domestic division of labor. Women in dual-earner couples still perform a disproportionate share. Of household and childcare labor, that is. Hochschild called this the second shift, in nineteen eighty-nine. And it holds even when their paid work hours match or exceed their partners'. So the summary line is that the evolution of gender roles is real but uneven. Both halves of that sentence carry weight.
Vandello And Bosson
Precarious Manhood
Why has that second asymmetry persisted? Vandello and Bosson offered an explanation in twenty thirteen. They call it precarious manhood theory. It begins from a contrast with womanhood. Manhood is treated culturally as a status that is hard to earn. Easily lost. And which must be repeatedly proved through public action. Womanhood, on this account, is not held the same way. Experimental evidence supports the hypothesis. Threats to masculinity produce reactive aggression, and risk-taking. And overt physical displays. Now see what this explains about the pace of change. Expanding the communal repertoire available to men has gone slowly. Slower than expanding the agentic repertoire available to women. Because communal behavior by men risks the very status under continuous threat.
Macro Level
Long-Term Change, and Its Reversibility
Zoom out to the macro level for the last piece. Inglehart and Norris ran a cross-national analysis, published in two thousand three. They traced a long-term shift toward more egalitarian gender attitudes. Correlated with rising economic security, and rising education. But with two important qualifications on that trend. It is uneven across regions. And it is reversible under conditions of perceived threat. This is not a ratchet that only turns one way. World Bank and International Labor Organization data add detail. Convergence in formal labor force participation among younger cohorts. In many countries, though not all. Alongside persistent gaps in unpaid care work. And in sectoral concentration, and in leadership representation. So refuse both available narratives. The triumphalist story of completed change, and the static story of unchanging patriarchy.
Consolidate
What to Carry Forward
Five terms to carry forward from this section. Agency and communion, the two axes underneath the whole literature. Androgyny, high standing on both of them at once. Social role theory, which derives stereotypes from role distributions. Role congruity theory, with its descriptive and injunctive incongruities. And precarious manhood, which explains the asymmetric pace of change. One habit to take into the rest of the chapter. When you meet a claim about gender-role change, ask two questions. Which axis does it concern? And in which direction did that axis move? The competence story and the communion story went opposite ways. Over the same seventy years, in the same country, in the same dataset.
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