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Subdomains of Gender‐Related Occupational Interests: Do They Form a Cohesive Bipolar M‐F Dimension?
Author(s) -
Lippa Richard A.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00326.x
Subject(s) - sexual orientation , psychology , lesbian , preference , same sex , dimension (graph theory) , social psychology , developmental psychology , psychoanalysis , mathematics , pure mathematics , economics , microeconomics
In four studies, with a total of 1780 male and 2969 female participants, subdomains of masculine and feminine occupations were identified from sets of occupational preference items. Identified masculine subdomains included “blue‐collar realistic” (e.g., carpenter), “educated realistic” (electrical engineer), and “flashy, risk‐taking” (jet pilot). Feminine subdomains included “fashion‐related” (fashion model), “artistic” (author), “helping” (social worker), and “children‐related” (manager of childcare center). In all studies, principal components analyses of subdomain preference scales showed that masculine subdomains were bipolar opposites of feminine subdomains. This bipolar structure emerged in analyses conducted on combined‐sex groups, high‐school boys, high‐school girls, men, women, heterosexual men, gay men, heterosexual women, and lesbian women. The results suggest that, although there are distinct masculine and feminine occupational subdomains, gender‐related occupational preferences, nonetheless, form a replicable, cohesive, bipolar individual difference dimension, which is not an artifact of studying mixed‐sex or mixed‐sexual‐orientation groups.