Women or men inside- an evaluation of BSRI test

Brain gender might not identical with biological gender

In the first floor meeting of my rez life, our floor fellow taught us to introduce ourselves in “preferred pronoun” to show our respect to those who feel their biological gender doesn’t match their psychological gender. A recent Oscar nominated movie Danish Girl also pictured a men who felt like a women internally. As transgender might not be that usual in our daily life, many has experience that sometimes their behavior doesn’t match their sex category. Thus the need for such measure is generated.

Bem Sex-Role Inventory is a psychological test measures people’s psychological gender, it measures the masculinity and femininity of a person’s psychological identity. 60 positive traits were divided into three categories: feminine, masculine and neutral(non-gender related)

I have a lot concerns on my brain gender type, as I always identify my self sometimes too masculine. However a few unexpected questions was raised while I was doing the test.

1. The categorization of traits is highly culture based. For example, words such as “competitive” and “aggressive” are categorized as positive masculine words in BSRI. But in Asian culture, these are highly undesirable traits as harmony is what the Asian society seek for. No one suppose to be differentiated and aggressiveness is often seen as the root of radical thoughts.
2. Traits are not described specifically thus ambiguous interpretation might occur. Words such as “unpredictable” could be interpreted under different situations and thus cause a confusion in the tested population. Such individual variation in word constructions might as well cause a third factor affecting the result of the test: language ability and how well your interpretation of the word coherent with the test constructor.
3. The test is constructed on gender stereotype in 1971, it only gives you results on how well you fit into the traditional gender models, not necessary how you identify yourself as. A word that’s categorized as masculine trait traditionally, might be a neutral trait in nowadays. Shift of concepts in society will change the gender stereotype, and thus the test result should be modify accordingly.

The test itself is very interesting, it’s valued on a traditional 7 point likert scale. Though its validity might shift as the society’s value on gender roles shift, it still shows some effort on distinguishing our brain gender and biological gender, which is progressively important through out history. I do wish that a more valid BSRI test with concerns of culture differences between areas can be constructed soon, so that I can actually measure how well I fit on that scale.

Source:

BEM SEX ROLE INVENTORY: http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/bsri.html