Study: Women may be Feminine

A landmark study conducted by researchers at the University of the United States has suggested that women may frequently exhibit characteristics and behaviors that are widely considered “feminine.” Researchers – and the general public – have long suspected a link between women and femininity, but the newly released results, to be published this month in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychobiology, make it more certain than ever that being a woman has dramatic effects on an individual’s likelihood to dress, speak, perform at school and at work, relate to friends and romantic partners, and think about sex and relationships, in ways conventionally associated with femininity.

“I think we’ve all been pretty sure, for a long time, that women are generally feminine,” said Dr. Rod Smith, one of the lead authors of the study. “But these results, and they were really much more dramatic than we even thought they would be when we started working on the research, really indicate, almost beyond doubt, I would say, that women display feminine characteristics in almost every area of their lives. You could almost say, I think, that women tend, in fact, to do things that are expected of women.”

Dr. Smith and Dr. Tiffany Brown, the other lead author, became interested in investigating this issue, which has been explored by numerous writers in both academic and popular books but has never before been the subject of a large and carefully controlled study, when they noticed that the female graduate students working in their lab tended, much more often than their male counterparts, demonstrate behaviors associated with femininity: for example, to wear high-heeled shoes and make-up to the lab, to exhibit a higher amount of uncertainty and self-doubt about their work, to form friendships with each other and talk with one another about the details of their romantic and family lives, and, in the cases of those with children, to express concern about balancing work and school with responsibilities at home.

“We’d notice, for example, that during lunch breaks, or even while going about their tasks, the men would not talk to each other all that much, or they would talk about sports, or headlines in the news, or things like that,” said Dr. Brown, who is herself a woman. “The women, on the other hand, we’d notice that they would bond with each other really quickly and quickly start revealing pretty intimate thing about their lives, you know, sharing things about the dates they went on last weekend, about fights with their mothers, things like that. Now, of course, liking to talk about this kind of thing with other women, having this kind of tendency to “chat” about personal matters, this is something that has for a long time been thought of as something that women do, as something that is much more feminine than masculine. So we started to ask, you know, might we be able to actually prove that women are more likely than men to behave in those ways?”

Ten thousand subjects, half of whom identified themselves as men and half as women, were selected to complete a survey designed by Dr. Smith and Brown and their team of researchers. All of the subjects were between the ages of 25 and 50, Caucasian, graduates of four-year colleges, and had a household income of at least $40,000 a year. There has been some criticism of the study’s inclusion only of white middle-class subjects, but Dr. Smith defended the team’s decision: “We all know that there are a lot of different factors that contribute to how people act, how people think, how people relate to their friends and their family members –– we know that the conditions you’re raised in, things like race and class, the kind of education you’ve received, not to mention, you know, all of these genetic factors, all of that, we know that it affects behavior, and, you know, science is just starting to work out where one thing stops and another thing starts. So what seemed most useful, in the case of our particular work here, was to control for as many of what we call variables as possible, to look at people who are similar in a lot of ways in terms of background, so that we could look more clearly at the question we were interested in, which is whether women are more likely to behave in these ways.”

The survey’s one hundred and fifty questions – the same for both men and women - asked subjects determine how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements designed to illustrate an attitude or behavior typically regarded as feminine, in areas such as childhood and education, body and appearance, romance and sexuality, self-image, family, and work. Sample questions included: “I tended not to speak up frequently in the classroom,” “I often worry that I’m too fat,” “I do the majority of the cleaning in my household,” “I enjoy romantic comedies and ‘chick flicks,’” “I expect my date to pay for dinner,” “I worry more about breast cancer than about heart disease,” “I find it difficult to orgasm during vaginal intercourse,” “I believe that sex is more fulfilling in the context of a monogamous long-term relationship.” “I date or dated with the goal of finding a spouse,” “Looking my best at work is important to me,” “I have, or have considered, quitting my job to stay home with my children.”

Though the researchers predicted that the female subjects would be more likely to respond positively to the survey’s statements, the results were even more dramatic than expected: women proved to be eighty percent more likely than men to “agree” with any given question. “It wasn’t surprising to us that women would consider themselves, more than men, to consider themselves as corresponding these various positions,” Dr. Brown commented, “but the consistency of these results, I would say, was really striking. These results, I think, are so important because they really demonstrate to us the remarkable correspondence between being a woman and feeling, you might say, that you really relate to these opinions, to these attitudes, that we think of as feminine. We would say, I think, that to us there’s really no doubt at this point that women, essentially are what we’re calling feminine, that for example women are, and we now have this scientific evidence, much more likely to be concerned about their appearance in the workplace, things like that.”

Or, as Dr. Smith put it, succinctly, “In light of these results, I’d state that women do, in fact, behave like women.” Reflecting on the directions in which his team, or other researchers, might continue to investigate these issues, he said, “What we’re eager to explore, now, is whether we will be able – and I would predict that this would be the case – to actually prove that there is association between certain biological features of women, maybe certain chemicals released the vagina, that in fact program them to take on these characteristics that we’re looking at here.”



Susie Morgan, a former elementary school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, asked her thoughts on the study while watching her three children at a playground, said, "When I got married and had kids, I had this sort of problem with giving up my job, you know, to take care of the kids, I thought maybe I could keep working part-time and my husband [Bob, a construction worker] could work part-time too, but what happened was that my husband thought that he should work and I should be the one who took care of all of this kids and house stuff." Mrs. Moran saw her three-year-old-son, Ross, fall off of a swing and ran over to comfort him, and after putting a bandage on his bleeding head and sending off to play again with his brothers, she said, "I'm glad to see this kind of thing...it makes me realize, I guess, that being a woman, it's just what needs to happen that I do these things, and my husband does these other things, and that's just the way that it is."