Published In

Social Psychological and Personality Science

Document Type

Post-Print

Publication Date

2022

Subjects

Social Roles -- Psychology

Abstract

Social role theory posits that binary gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in less egalitarian countries, reflecting these countries’ more pronounced sex-based power divisions. Conversely, evolutionary and self-construal theorists suggest that gender gaps in agency and communion should be larger in more egalitarian countries, reflecting the greater autonomy support and flexible self-construction processes present in these countries. Using data from 62 countries (N = 28,640), we examine binary gender gaps in agentic and communal self-views as a function of country-level objective gender equality (the Global Gender Gap Index) and subjective distributions of social power (the Power Distance Index). Findings show that in more egalitarian countries, gender gaps in agency are smaller and gender gaps in communality are larger. These patterns are driven primarily by cross-country differences in men’s self-views and by the Power Distance Index (PDI) more robustly than the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI). We consider possible causes and implications of these findings.

Rights

© Copyright the author(s)

Description

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Social psychological and personality science, 19485506221129687 Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Social psychological and personality science, 19485506221129687.

DOI

10.1177/19485506221129687

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39840

Included in

Psychology Commons

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