It's been called the "Feminist Paradox": Feminism's aim is to improve the lives of all women, yet only about a third of women in the United States identify as feminists. That disparity is even starker when you consider that surveys show three-quarters of women to be concerned about women's rights.

Why do most women eschew the feminist label? Perhaps it's because we don't like to categorize ourselves socially or politically. After all, far more Americans identify as independent rather than align themselves with a political party. It could also be that feminism is not clearly defined. There's liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, ecofeminism, womanism, and a boatload of other different brands, all espousing diverse ideologies and expressing varying levels of activism. The hodgepodge might lead women to remain agnostic. Another reason is the less-then-flattering image of feminists offered up in the popular media, which often depicts them as extremist, unattractive man-haters.

Entering the controversial fray with a new eyebrow-raising explanation -- and even some empirical data to back it up -- is a team of psychologists from Umeå University in Sweden. They hypothesize that the activists who get the headlines and shape feminist attitudes are "generally more physiologically and psychologically masculinized than is typical for women." Basically, there may be "biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda."

"We propose the feminists-as-masculinized-females theory... as a partial explanation for the feminist paradox," they write in a research article published Tuesday to the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The empirical data that was mentioned originated from a feminist conference in Sweden. The researchers visited the gathering and offered candy in exchange for participation. Subjects answered questions designed to measure social dominance and had their hands imaged with a high resolution scanner so that researchers could measure the ratio of the length of the index finger to the ring finger, which is the most widely used index of prenatal testosterone exposure. Men have a lower ratio (meaning the index finger is shorter than the ring finger) while women have a higher ratio (the index and ring fingers are more similar in length). Participation in the study was anonymous and no demographic data was collected. The researchers did not directly ask the subjects whether they were feminists, thinking that it would deter participation.

25 women -- approximately 35% of attendees at the conference -- took part in the survey. The researchers found their index-ring finger ratio to be vastly more masculine compared to the average for Swedish women. (For the statistics lovers out there, the p values were <0.000001 for the right hand and 0.00016 for the left hand. That's remarkably significant.) The difference indicates that the women were exposed to higher levels of testosterone during development, engendering more masculine characteristics.

The biggest limitation to the study is the small sample size. One simply cannot draw sweeping conclusions based on 25 individuals, a fact the authors admit.

"The target population studied here is not necessarily representative for anyone who sympathizes with feminism or self-identifies as a feminist. As our data pertain to feminist activists, we cannot and do not bring them to bear on women in general."

Source: Guy Madison, Ulrika Aasa, JohnWallert and Michael A.Woodley. " Feminist activist women are masculinized in terms of digit-ratio and social dominance: a possible explanation for the feminist paradox." Front. Psychol., 09 September 2014 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01011

(AP Photo)