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.