Bem Sex Role Inventory

Construction of the BSRI

In 1974, Bern and her students compiled a list of 200 personality characteristics that seemed positively valued and stereotypically masculine or feminine, as well as 200 other characteristics that seemed neither masculine nor feminine. Of those other characteristics, half were positively valued, and half were negatively valued. Bern and her students distributed the list of 400 items to two samples of Stanford University's undergraduates. In each sample, half of the subjects of each sex rated each characteristic in terms of its sex-typed social desirability for a man, and the other half of the subjects rated each characteristic in terms of its desirability for a woman. The rating scale ranged from “Not at all desirable” to “Extremely desirable.” Personality characteristics that were judged as more desirable for a man than for a woman or more desirable for a woman than for a man qualified for inclusion in the masculinity and femininity scales, respectively. Of those eligible items, 20 were selected for each scale. Personality characteristics that were judged as no more desirable for one sex than the other qualified for inclusion in the social desirability scale. Of those, 10 positive and 10 negative characteristics were chosen. The final lists of the items included in each of the scales are presented in Table 1.

Source: Modified and reproduced by special permission of the Publisher, CPP, Inc., Mountain View, C A 94043 from Bern Sex Role Inventory, Professional Manual, by Sandra Lipsitz Bern, PhD. Copyright 1981 by CPP, Inc. All rights reserved. Further reproduction is prohibited without the Publisher's written consent.

[Page 60]The BSRI takes about 15 minutes to complete. Respondents indicate how well each item describes themselves, from 1 (“Never or almost never true”) to 7 (“Always or almost always true”). The masculinity score is the average of the ratings on the 20 masculine items, and the femininity score is the average of the ratings on the 20 feminine items. The scoring of the BSRI by design does not treat the masculine and feminine items as clustering at opposite ends of a linear continuum, but instead as measures of two independent scales. Subsequent analyses by Bern and others have supported the claim that masculinity and femininity are logically and empirically independent.

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