Psychological Androgyny in a Working Population with Comparison to a College Sample.

Sex role orientations were investigated in a working population with comparison to a college sample. The working sample of 124 women and 104 men include 44 first line supervisors and 184 of their subordinates in the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania. The college sample included 56 women from Bryn Mawr College and 48 men from Haverford College. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory BSRI, with additional work-related and personal interaction items, was administered to the two samples as a self-description scale, and to the working sample as a target attribution scale to describe male and female co-workers. When BSRI scores were classified according to median splits for the industrial sample, men tended to be classified as masculine and undifferentiated low on both masculine and feminine dimensions more frequently than women. Women were more frequently classified as feminine. Sex role orientation was weakly associated with favorable perceptions of opposite sex co-workers, Androgynous high on both masculine and feminine dimensions and masculine men, and androgynous and feminine women assigned the most favorable ratings to both same and opposite sex co-workers.