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14 - Social comparisons across cultures I: Gender stereotypes in high and low power distance cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2009

By
Michel Désert  and
Jacques-Philippe Leyens
Edited by
Serge Guimond
Michel Désert
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive (CNRS) Université Blaise Pascal Clermont-Ferrand France
Jacques-Philippe Leyens
Affiliation:
Catholic University of Louvain Department of Psychology Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium
Serge Guimond
Affiliation:
Université de Clermont-Ferrand II (Université Blaise Pascal), France
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Summary

Very different social roles are generally assigned to women and men (Eagly, 1987). These roles are translated into stereotypical beliefs about typically female attributes and typically male attributes (Williams and Best, 1986, 1990). Women, for instance, are supposed to be sweet and nurturing. These characteristics are even considered desirable for them. By contrast, men are viewed as cold, domineering, and egotistic. These stereotypes overlap with self-perceptions of women and men (Bem, 1974), and they are not restricted to western countries. Similar data about the self-perceptions of female and male dimensions have been obtained from both men and women in Germany, Japan, Italy, France, Spain, etc. (Lenney, 1991; Lorenzi-Cioldi, 1993; Moya, 1993). Despite some disparities, men from all these cultures see themselves as having more male attributes than do women and the reverse is true for women concerning female attributes. Such a consensus led some authors (Bakan, 1966; Gabriel and Gardner, 1999) to think that it reflects sexual differences that are genetically determined.

Costa, Terracciano, and McCrae (2001), however, made an intriguing finding. In their cross-cultural research based on the five-factor model of personality, they found that differences in personality traits between men and women were greater in western countries than in African and Asian ones. First, these data do not conform to the genetic explanation for the differences between genders.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Comparison and Social Psychology
Understanding Cognition, Intergroup Relations, and Culture
 , pp. 303 - 317
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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