Sandra Bem

Introduction

Sandra Ruth Lipsitz Bem (June 22, 1944 – May 20, 2014) was an American psychologist who gave the women's movement a measurement instrument and a theory. Her Bem Sex Role Inventory, published in 1974, treated masculinity and femininity as two independent dimensions rather than opposite ends of one line, which made it possible to ask whether possessing both sets of traits was an advantage. Her gender schema theory, published in 1981, argued that the sex difference people care about most is not anatomical but cognitive — a habit of sorting the world by gender that children acquire from the culture around them.

Both ideas were designed to be usable. Bem wanted evidence that could be taken into court, into a school, into an argument about who may apply for which job, and both were built with that destination in mind. She also lived the arrangement she studied: she and her husband Daryl Bem were, for years, paid speakers on egalitarian marriage precisely because they practiced one.

Early Life and Education

Bem was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Peter and Lillian Lipsitz, and raised in a working-class Jewish household. The family spent her first eight years in a government-subsidized neighbourhood. Her mother worked throughout Bem's childhood and pressed her daughter to expect more than housework; Bem's first career ambition was to be a secretary like her mother, because a secretary had her own desk and her own telephone, markers of independence her father never had. Her mother's ambitions for her, and the violence of her parents' arguments, are both described in Bem's own later writing.

At her Orthodox Jewish grade school she insisted on wearing trousers rather than a skirt and came close to expulsion. The episode prefigured the research: a child refusing a rule that everyone treated as natural.

She entered Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, then part of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and majored in psychology. A counsellor there suggested she consider becoming a psychiatrist, the first time anyone had proposed a high-status career to her. In her final year she took a course from a young assistant professor, Daryl Bem, and asked him to supervise an independent study. She turned down his first proposal because she feared marriage would end her career; they agreed instead on an egalitarian marriage with shared housework, shared parenting, and mutual support for two careers, and married on June 6, 1965. They had two children.

She enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1965 and completed her doctorate in developmental psychology in 1968, working on children's problem solving and self-control under the influence of the experimental psychologist David Birch.

Academic and Professional Career

Bem began as an assistant professor at Carnegie-Mellon, where she stayed about three years, and then moved to Stanford University. Her early work was on children's cognition, and her entry into gender research came through activism rather than the laboratory: she studied sex-segregated help-wanted advertising at a time when newspapers divided job listings into "Help Wanted — Male" and "Help Wanted — Female," and her work contributed to the legal challenges that ended the practice, including cases against AT&T and the Pittsburgh Press. The Supreme Court struck down sex-segregated classified advertising in 1973.

Stanford denied her tenure and she left in 1978. She and Daryl Bem both took tenured positions at Cornell University that year, where she became a professor of psychology and directed the women's studies program. Cornell was where she did the work she is known for — gender schema theory, the psychology of sexuality, and clinical work — and she stayed until retiring in 2010.

Her honors included the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution, the Association for Women in Psychology's Distinguished Publication Award, and the American Association of University Women's Young Scholar Award. In 1995 the APA's Divisions of General Psychology and the History of Psychology named her an Eminent Woman in Psychology.

She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease at 65. Four years later, after pursuing experimental treatments and having decided in advance that she would not let the disease take her independence, she ended her own life at her home in Ithaca, New York, on May 20, 2014, with Daryl present. She was 69. Her memoir An Unconventional Family had already put her private arrangements into print; her death put them into the obituaries.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Bem Sex Role Inventory

The BSRI asked respondents to rate themselves on 60 characteristics: 20 judged more desirable for a man in American society, 20 judged more desirable for a woman, and 20 neutral fillers. The innovation was scoring. Instead of placing everyone on a single masculine-to-feminine line, the inventory produced two independent scores, and crossing them at the median produced four categories — masculine, feminine, androgynous (high on both), and undifferentiated (low on both).

The point was political as well as psychometric. Under the old bipolar model, a woman who was assertive was ipso facto less feminine; under the two-dimensional model she was simply high on both. The inventory allowed the claim that androgyny — the capacity to draw on both instrumental and expressive traits as a situation requires — was associated with better psychological adjustment than either extreme. The BSRI became one of the most widely used instruments in the psychology of gender, and the fourfold scheme entered textbooks within a decade.

Gender schema theory

Gender schema theory, published in Psychological Review in 1981, asked why sex typing happens at all. Bem's answer was that children learn to read their culture for the cues that distinguish male from female, build a schema around them, and then use that schema to organise everything else. A child who has learned that gender matters will sort toys, clothes, occupations and personality traits by it, and will evaluate his or her own adequacy against the prototype the schema contains.

The theory made gender polarization a cognitive habit rather than a biological fact, and it located the mechanism in culture rather than in the child. Bem's later book The Lenses of Gender (1993) extended the argument into law, medicine, and the workplace, treating the binary as three lenses — polarization, androcentrism, and biological essentialism — through which a society sees what it has already decided is there.

The legal and institutional work

The significance of Bem's expert work on sex-segregated advertising is easy to overlook because it was not a theory. She produced evidence that a practice everyone treated as a description of the labour market was in fact a constraint on it, and the constraint was removed. Her early papers with Daryl Bem on the training of women "to know their place" used the word sexism before it was common and argued that the arrangement damaged men as well.

Major Publications

Bem, S. L., & Bem, D. J. (1970). Case study of a nonconscious ideology: Training the woman to know her place. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 15(3), 199–204.
Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155–162.
Bem, S. L. (1979). Theory and measurement of androgyny: A reply to the Pedhazur–Tetenbaum and Locksley–Colten critiques. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 1047–1054.
Bem, S. L. (1981). Gender schema theory: A cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review, 88(4), 354–364.
Bem, S. L. (1981). The BSRI and gender schema theory: A reply to Spence and Helmreich. Psychological Review, 88(5), 369–371.
Bem, S. L. (1993). The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Bem, S. L. (1998). An Unconventional Family. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Impact and Legacy

The two-dimensional model won. Masculinity and femininity are now standardly treated as separate continuous Dimensions rather than as poles, and the fourfold scheme — or its statistical successors — is everywhere in gender research. The deeper claim, that gender is a cognitive schema acquired from culture rather than an expression of biology, became a founding assumption of social constructionist work on gender and helped prepare the ground for later accounts that treat gender as something done rather than something had.

The measurement was attacked almost immediately, and the attacks were effective. Pedhazur and Tetenbaum showed in 1979 that the BSRI's femininity items were not matched to the masculinity items in social desirability: masculinity items are largely positive, while femininity items include traits such as childlike and gullible. That asymmetry makes the two scales unequal in a way that complicates every comparison drawn between them. Janet Spence and Robert Helmreich, whose Personal Attributes Questionnaire was built to avoid the problem by using only positively valued items, pressed a deeper objection. They argued that the BSRI measures self-images of instrumental and expressive traits, which show little or no relation to global self-images of masculinity and femininity and none to the unidimensional construct of gender schematicity. On their reading the instrument was being used to measure something it does not measure, and Spence's own evidence was that self-rated masculinity and femininity correlate only weakly with BSRI scale scores. Bem replied directly, twice, and the exchange is worth reading because both sides were right about something: the inventory tapped traits, and Bem's theory was about schemata.

Two further problems are structural. The item content was fixed by what Stanford undergraduates in the early 1970s judged sex-typed, which means the instrument ages: several items no longer read as stereotypically gendered in contemporary samples, and the inventory has no way to register new gender identities that were not available as categories when it was built. And the median split that produces the four categories discards variance and can reclassify the same person depending on which sample's median is used; most researchers now treat the two scores as continuous variables.

There is also a problem with the payoff Bem claimed. Reviews of the androgyny literature found that masculinity scores predict self-esteem and adjustment more strongly than femininity scores, for men and for women — which does not support the hypothesis that the two dimensions are of equal value to both sexes. The finding is itself a datum about a society that values agentic traits, but it is not the result the theory predicted. Bem herself came to regard the BSRI as having been misread: people took masculine and feminine traits as inhering in men and women rather than as constructs that produce gender polarization, and she moved her own work toward schema theory in part because of it.

The last turn is theoretical. Bem's framework treats gender as two dimensions of personality. Later work — from social identity theory, from work on gender self-categorization, and from the visibility of identities such as genderqueer — treats gender identity as a matter of identification with a group, measured by asking people directly how central that membership is to who they are. On that view the BSRI is not measuring gender identity at all, and the 2 × 2 scheme that made Bem famous has quietly lost the argument it won.

Learn More

Daryl Bem, her husband, collaborator and co-author on her first paper about gender
Gender schema theory, the framework she proposed in 1981
Carl Jung, whose anima and animus are cited as a forerunner of psychological androgyny
Social psychology, the discipline her work on sex typing reshaped
Alice Eagly — whose meta-analytic work on gender and social roles reshaped the same corner of social psychology
Leonore Tiefer — who argues that medicalising women sexual problems serves pharmaceutical interests

References

Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(2), 155-162.