Sandra Bem
American psychologist of gender, androgyny and gender schema theory
Cornell psychologist who created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (1974), treated masculinity and femininity as separate dimensions, and proposed gender schema theory in 1981.
Why this person matters
Bem challenged the idea that masculinity and femininity are opposite ends of one scale and made androgyny a measurable concept. Her gender schema theory explained how children learn to organise information by gender, and she directed Cornell's women's studies programme.
Main contributions
Bem Sex-Role Inventory
Published in 1974 as The measurement of psychological androgyny, it used 60 items rated on a seven-point scale: 20 masculine, 20 feminine and 20 filler. High scores on both scales were labelled androgynous, and low scores on both undifferentiated.
Gender schema theory
Published in Psychological Review (1981), it holds that people organise information into categories based on gender, and that children judge their adequacy against internalised gender prototypes.
The Lenses of Gender
Her 1993 book The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (Yale University Press) argued for transforming the debate on sexual inequality.
Context and limits
Items on the inventory reflected what was considered culturally appropriate for men and women in the early 1970s. Its theoretical framework and validity have been debated, and other researchers often had difficulty replicating findings with the scale. Some critics said Bem did not define constructs such as gender schema adequately.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Bem appears in gender and development, and in personality measurement. Students learn androgyny and gender schemas as alternatives to a single masculinity-femininity scale.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1968
Received her PhD from the University of Michigan.
- 1974
Published the Bem Sex-Role Inventory.
- 1978
Left Stanford after her tenure application was denied and joined Cornell, where she directed the women's studies programme.
- 1981
Published gender schema theory in Psychological Review.
Sources
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Sandra BemSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Sandra BemReference work. Reference article inspected.