Abstract
The present study explores women’s ideals for masculinity in different social contexts (work, family/romance, and friendship) and compares how traditional (agentic) and non-patriarchal (communal) masculinity are valued in each context. Survey data were collected from one international (N = 159) and three South African samples (Ns = 86, 100, 161) of women. Results show that although women value patriarchal ideals for masculinity, agentic and communal versions of masculinity are valued differently across contexts. Specifically, traditional agentic versions of masculinity were most valued in the contexts most important to the long-term production of viable identity (family/romance and work). It was only in friendship that non-patriarchal communal masculinity was consistently idealized over traditional agentic masculinity. The results are discussed in relation to hegemonic masculinity (HM) and system justification theory (SJT). Congruent with SJT, women idealized versions of masculinity that may not be in their own or their group’s best interests, but in line with HM, the results emphasized the fluidity of masculinity and that the same individual can simultaneously idealize different versions of masculinity depending on the context. Because stereotypes are both explanations for the status quo and warrants for behaving in one way or another, these collective ideals for masculinity and contextual boundaries may be important obstacles to achieving gender equity.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Backus, F. R., & Mahalik, J. R. (2011). The masculinity of Mr. right: Feminist identity and heterosexual women’s ideal romantic partners. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 35(2), 318–326. doi:10.1177/0361684310392357.
Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: An essay on psychology and religion. England: Rand McNally.
Banchefsky, S., & Park, B. (2016). The 'new father': Dynamic stereotypes of fathers. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 17(1), 103–107. doi:10.1037/a0038945.
Barrett, F. J. (1996). The organizational construction of hegemonic masculinity: The case of the US navy. Gender, Work and Organization, 3(3), 129–142. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.1996.tb00054.x.
Batnitzky, A., McDowell, L., & Dyer, S. (2009). Flexible and strategic masculinities: The working lives and gendered identities of male migrants in london. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35(8), 1275–1293. doi:10.1080/13691830903123088.
Baxter, J., Haynes, M., Western, M., & Hewitt, B. (2013). Gender, justice and domestic work: Life course transitions and perceptions of fairness. Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, 4(1), 78–85.
Becker, J. C. (2010). Why do women endorse hostile and benevolent sexism? The role of salient female subtypes and internalization of sexist contents. Sex Roles, 62(7–8), 453–467. doi:10.1007/s11199-009-9707-4.
Being a Strong Independent Woman. (2017, March 3). Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/Being-a-Strong-Independent-Woman-185781448134898. Accessed 24 Aug 2011.
Bernhardt, E., Noack, T., & Lyngstad, T. H. (2008). Shared housework in Norway and Sweden: Advancing the gender revolution. Journal of European Social Policy, 18(3), 275–288.
Bleske-Rechek, A. L., & Buss, D. M. (2001). Opposite-sex friendship: Sex differences and similarities in initiation, selection, and dissolution. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(10), 1310–1323. doi:10.1177/01461672012710007.
Burns, A. (2000). IV. Looking for love in intimate heterosexual relationships. Feminism & Psychology, 10(4), 481–485.
Cikara, M., Lee, T. L., Fiske, S. T., Glick, P., & Jost, J. T. (2009). Ambivalent sexism at home and at work: How attitudes toward women in relationships foster exclusion in the public sphere. In A. C. Kay & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification (pp. 444–462). New York: Oxford University Press.
Clow, K. A., Ricciardelli, R., & Bartfay, W. J. (2015). Are you man enough to be a nurse? The impact of ambivalent sexism and role congruity on perceptions of men and women in nursing advertisements. Sex Roles, 72(7–8), 363–376. doi:10.1007/s11199-014-0418-0.
Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Connell, R. W. (1993). The big picture: Masculinities in recent world history. Theory and Society, 22(5), 597–623. doi:10.1007/bf00993538.
Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Connell, R. W., & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender and Society, 19, 829–859. doi:10.1177/0891243205278639.
Croft, A., Schmader, T., & Block, K. (2015). An underexamined inequality: Cultural and psychological barriers to men’s engagement with communal roles. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 19(4), 343–370. doi:10.1177/1088868314564789.
Davis, S. N., & Greenstein, T. N. (2004). Cross-national variations in the division of household labor. Journal of Marriage and Family, 66(5), 1260–1271. doi:10.1111/j.0022-2445.2004.00091.x.
de Vaus, D. A. (2002). Surveys in social research (5th ed.). London: Routledge.
Demetriou, D. Z. (2001). Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity: A critique. Theory and Society, 30(3), 337–361.
Dixon, J., & Wetherell, M. (2004). On discourse and dirty nappies: Gender, the division of household labour and the social psychology of distributive justice. Theory & Psychology, 14(2), 167–189.
Donaldson, M. (1993). What is hegemonic masculinity? Theory and Society, 22(5), 643–657.
Durrheim, K., Quayle, M., & Dixon, J. (2016). The struggle for the nature of 'prejudice': 'Prejudice' expression as identity performance. Political Psychology, 37(1), 17–35. doi:10.1111/pops.12310.
Eagly, A. H., & Steffen, V. J. (1984). Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of women and men into social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(4), 735–754.
Eagly, A. H., Wood, W., & Diekman, A. B. (2000). Social role theory of sex differences and similarities: A current appraisal. In T. Trautner & H. M. Eckes (Eds.), The developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 123–174). New York: Psychology Press.
Edley, N., & Wetherell, M. (1997). Jockeying for position: The construction of masculine identities. Discourse and Society, 8, 203–217.
Ezzell, M. B. (2012). “I’m in control”: Compensatory manhood in a therapeutic community. Gender and Society, 26(2), 190–215.
Frosh, S., Phoenix, A., & Pattman, R. (2002). Young masculinities. New York: Palgrave.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance: Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary justifications for gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56(2), 109–118.
Glick, P., Fiske, S. T., Mladinic, A., Saiz, J. L., Abrams, D., Masser, B., et al. (2000). Beyond prejudice as simple antipathy: Hostile and benevolent sexism across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 763–775. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.763.
Gough, H. G. (1952). Identifying psychological femininity. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 12, 427–439. doi:10.1177/001316445201200309.
Guimond, S. (2008). Psychological similarities and differences between women and men across cultures. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2(1), 494–510. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00036.x.
Haines, E. L., Deaux, K., & Lofaro, N. (2016). The times they are a-changing … or are they not? A comparison of gender stereotypes, 1983–2014. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 40(3), 353–363. doi:10.1177/0361684316634081.
Haslam, S. A., Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., Reynolds, K. J., & Doosje, B. (2002). From personal pictures in the head to collective tools in the world: How shared stereotypes allow groups to represent and change social reality. In C. Mcgarty, V. Y. Yzerbyt, & R. Spears (Eds.), Stereotypes as explanations: The formation of meaningful beliefs about social groups (pp. 157–185). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hot, Cute or OK. (2017, March 3). Retrieved from https://apps.facebook.com/hotcuteokay/. Accessed 24 Aug 2011.
Jewkes, R., Morrell, R., Hearn, J., Lundqvist, E., Blackbeard, D., Lindegger, G., et al. (2015). Hegemonic masculinity: Combining theory and practice in gender interventions. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 17(2), 96–111. doi:10.1080/13691058.2015.1085094.
Jost, J. T. (2001). Outgroup favoritism and the theory of system justification: A paradigm for investigating the effects of socioeconomic success on stereotype content. In G. B. Moskowitz (Ed.), Cognitive social psychology: The Princeton symposium on the legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 89–102). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology, 33(1), 1–27. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01008.x.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo. Political Psychology, 25(6), 881–919. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.x.
Jost, J. T., & Burgess, D. (2000). Attitudinal ambivalence and the conflict between group and system justification motives in low status groups. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26(3), 293–305. doi:10.1177/0146167200265003.
Jost, J. T., & Kay, A. C. (2005). Exposure to benevolent sexism and complementary gender stereotypes: Consequences for specific and diffuse forms of system justification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(3), 498–509. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.88.3.498.
Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with patriarchy. Gender and Society, 2(3), 274–290.
Knights, D., & Kerfoot, D. (2004). Between representations and subjectivity: Gender binaries and the politics of organizational transformation. Gender, Work and Organization, 11(4), 430–454. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0432.2004.00241.x.
LimeSurvey Project Team / Carsten Schmitz. (2012). LimeSurvey: An open source survey tool. Hamburg. Retrieved from http://limesurvey.org.
Mehta, C. M., & Dementieva, Y. (2016). The contextual specificity of gender: Femininity and masculinity in college students’ same- and other-gender peer contexts. Sex Roles. Advance online publication. doi:10.1007/s11199-016-0632-z
Messerschmidt, J. W. (2012). Engendering gendered knowledge: Assessing the academic appropriation of hegemonic masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 15(1), 56–76.
Park, L. E., Young, A. F., Troisi, J. D., & Pinkus, R. T. (2011). Effects of everyday romantic goal pursuit on women’s attitudes toward math and science. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(9), 1259–1273. doi:10.1177/0146167211408436.
Peele, M. (2009). New worlds of friendship: The early twentieth century. In B. Caine (Ed.), Friendship: A history (pp. 279–216). London: Routledge.
Petersen, A. (2003). Research on men and masculinities: Some implications of recent theory for future work. Men and Masculinities, 6(1), 54–69. doi:10.1177/1097184X02250843.
Pfeffer, C. A., Rogalin, C. L., & Gee, C. A. (2016). Masculinities through a cross-disciplinary lens: Lessons from sociology and psychology. Sociology Compass, 10(8), 652–672. doi:10.1111/soc4.12396.
Prentice, D. A., & Carranza, E. (2002). What women and men should be, shouldn’t be, are allowed to be, and don’t have to be: The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26(4), 269–281. doi:10.1111/1471-6402.t01-1-00066.
Reicher, S., Hopkins, N., & Condor, S. (1997). Stereotype construction as a strategy of influence. In R. Spears, P. J. Oakes, N. Ellemers, & S. A. Haslam (Eds.), The social psychology of stereotyping and group life (pp. 94–118). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Riley, S. C. E. (2003). The management of the traditional male role: A discourse analysis of the constructions and functions of provision. Journal of Gender Studies, 12(2), 99–113. doi:10.1080/0958923032000088300.
Rummel, R. J. (1970). Applied factor analysis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Schacht, S. P. (1996). Misogyny on and off the "pitch": The gendered world of male rugby players. Gender and Society, 10(5), 550–565.
Schneider, M. C., & Bos, A. L. (2014). Measuring stereotypes of female politicians. Political Psychology, 35(2), 245–266. doi:10.1111/pops.12040.
Sherriffs, A. C., & McKee, J. P. (1957). Qualitative aspects of beliefs about men and women. Journal of Personality, 25(4), 451–464. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1957.tb01540.x.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spears, R., & Smith, H. J. (2001). Experiments as politics. Political Psychology, 22(2), 309–330.
Speer, S. A. (2005). Gender talk: Feminism, discourse, and conversation analysis. London: Routledge.
Subašić, E., Reynolds, K. J., Reicher, S. D., & Klandermans, B. (2012). Where to from here for the psychology of social change? Future directions for theory and practice. Political Psychology, 33(1), 61–74. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00864.x.
Tai, T., & Treas, J. (2013). Housework task hierarchies in 32 countries. European Sociological Review, 29(4), 780–791.
Talbot, K., & Quayle, M. (2010). The perils of being a nice guy: Contextual variation in five young women’s constructions of acceptable hegemonic and alternative masculinities. Men and Masculinities, 13(2), 255–278. doi:10.1177/1097184X09350408.
Thompson, E. H. J., & Bennett, K. M. (2015). Measurement of masculinity ideologies: A (critical) review. Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 16(2), 115–133. doi:10.1037/a0038609.
van der Toorn, J., & Jost, J. T. (2014). Twenty years of system justification theory: Introduction to the special issue on ideology and system justification processes. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 17(4), 413–419. doi:10.1177/1368430214531509.
Weichselbaumer, D., & Winter-Ebmer, R. (2005). A meta-analysis of the international gender wage gap. Journal of Economic Surveys, 19(3), 479–511.
Wetherell, M., & Edley, N. (1999). Negotiating hegemonic masculinity: Imaginary positions and psycho-discursive practices. Feminism & Psychology, 9(3), 335–356.
Whorley, M. R., & Addis, M. E. (2006). Ten years of psychological research on men and masculinity in the United States: Dominant methodological trends. Sex Roles, 55(9), 649–658. doi:10.1007/s11199-006-9120-1.
Williams, J. E., Satterwhite, R. C., & Best, D. L. (1999). Pancultural gender stereotypes revisited: The five factor model. Sex Roles, 40(7), 513–525. doi:10.1023/A:1018831928829.
Wong, Y. J., Steinfeldt, J. A., Speight, Q. L., & Hickman, S. J. (2010). Content analysis of psychology of men & masculinity (2000-2008). Psychology of Men & Masculinity, 11(3), 170–181. doi:10.1037/a0019133.
Acknowledgements
The present research was supported by funding from the South African National Research Foundation (grant #TTK1206141295).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
All studies reported on in this paper received full ethical review and approval from the responsible ethics committee prior to data collection.
Conflict of Interest
None of the authors have any conflicts of interest to declare.
Informed Consent
All participants participated voluntarily, with clear information about the risks and benefits of participation and fully aware of their right to terminate participation at any time.
Electronic supplementary material
ESM 1
(DOCX 34 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Quayle, M., Lindegger, G., Brittain, K. et al. Women’s Ideals for Masculinity Across Social Contexts: Patriarchal Agentic Masculinity is Valued in Work, Family, and Romance but Communal Masculinity in Friendship. Sex Roles 78, 52–66 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0772-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0772-9