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Understanding the Magnitude of Psychological Differences Between Women and Men Requires Seeing the Forest and the Trees.


ABSTRACT: Whether women and men are psychologically very similar or quite different is a contentious issue in psychological science. This article clarifies this issue by demonstrating that larger and smaller sex/gender differences can reflect differing ways of organizing the same data. For single psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ by sex/gender to produce scales of a construct's overall typicality for women versus men. For example, averaging self-ratings on personality traits more typical of women or men yields much larger sex/gender differences on measures of the femininity and masculinity of personality. Sex/gender differences on such broad-gauge, thematic variables are large relative to differences on their component indicators. This increased effect magnitude for aggregated scales reflects gains in both their reliability and validity as indicators of sex/gender. In addition, in psychological domains such as vocational interests that are composed of many variables, at least some of which differ by sex/gender, the multivariate distance between women and men is typically larger than the differences on the component variables. These analyses encourage recognition of the interdependence of sex/gender similarity and difference in psychological data.

SUBMITTER: Eagly AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9442632 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Understanding the Magnitude of Psychological Differences Between Women and Men Requires Seeing the Forest and the Trees.

Eagly Alice H AH   Revelle William W  

Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science 20220509 5


Whether women and men are psychologically very similar or quite different is a contentious issue in psychological science. This article clarifies this issue by demonstrating that larger and smaller sex/gender differences can reflect differing ways of organizing the same data. For single psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple indicators that differ by sex/gender to produce scales of a construct's overall typicality for women versus men. For example, averaging  ...[more]

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