The impact of context on gender social identities

What follows is a quasi-experimental study aiming to analyse the influence of the social division of roles (especially the division between public and private spheres of activity on gender social identities. Subjects were ask ed to describe themselves as well as their images of the 'perfect or ideal person' in the context of their professional activities or their close rela tionships. The order of presentation (self-description and the description of the 'perfect person') was balanced. We found that women and men perceive d themselves according to the traditional gender stereotypes (women perceiv ed themselves as more feminine while men describe themselves as more mascul ine). However the context in which subjects imagined themselves affected th eir self-perceptions as well as their images of the 'ideal person': A publi c context (professional activity) elicited more masculine self-images in wo men and men whereas private contexts (close relationships) led to more femi nine images of themselves. Furthermore, the images of the 'perfect person' varied according to which context was salient: these images were more mascu line in the public context and more feminine in the private one. Finally, t he asymmetry hypothesis in social comparison was confirmed. Although there was a significant correlation between self-images and the image of the 'per fect or ideal person', this correlation was stronger when subjects describe d themselves first and described their images of the 'ideal person' before. This result was interpreted as reflecting the subjects' tendency to see th emselves as prototypes in the social comparison. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wi ley & Sons, Ltd.