Masculinity/Femininity Test

This is a test of how masculine or feminine your personality is. There exist many tests that do this, but they are usually based on a conception of masculinity/femininity as being gender roles; i.e. rules or virtues that apply differently to men and women. This test is instead based on a conception of masculinity/femininity known as Gender Diagnosticity. In this conception, masculinity/femininity is defined by the ways men and women differ, whether due to gender roles, innate factors, or anything else. Thus, your final score will be a probability telling you how many people with your personality are estimated to be male or female.

If you wish to know more about how this test works, you can see the Construction section at the bottom of this page.

Disclaimers

This test does not claim to be measuring innate masculinity/femininity. In fact, research has shown that the way you are raised has an effect on the gender diagnosticity of your personality.

This is not a "trans test", and it is neither designed nor intended to be one. In earlier iterations of the test, a lot of people have implicitly assumed that this test is about whether one is transgender, but this test has very little connection with affective gender identity, as it instead focuses more broadly on gender diagnosticity.

Gender differences are not constant across time and space, and so gender diagnosticity depends on the sample that it is calibrated for. The items for this test came from the ESCS sample, by taking the personality items with the largest gender differences. This has an effect on the questions asked in the test. The weights were not, however, calibrated for ESCS, but instead for reddit's SampleSize community, which is much younger than the ESCS sample. If you are different from the people of SampleSize, the test may give invalid results.

While many items in this test are related to gender roles, this test is not meant for measuring gender roles. For instance, compared to gender role tests, this test does not have a measure of assertiveness. The reason for this is that the gender difference in assertiveness is infinitesimal, so it is not a good measure of gender differences.

This test is likely to be incomplete in terms of measuring masculinity/femininity. It relies solely on gendered personality items, and as a result it doesn't capture anything outside of personality, nor will it do well at capturing the interactions between gendered and nongendered traits.

Libido is placed under instrumentality, but when focusing on within-gender variance, it would function almost as well under expressivity. Factor-analytically, it does work out best as an instrumental rather than expressive trait, and that's convenient as otherwise we would have an expressive trait with greater male than female average, but it's not really very confidently instrumental.

The test results mention that expressivity and instrumentality are sometimes informally considered to be femininity and masculinity. This should not be interpreted to mean that they are the same as femininity/masculinity, but rather that this is how some people interpret them to be.

The items for the fourteen facets of instrumentality and expressivity were not selected to optimize the ability to measure instrumentality and expressivity, nor were they optimized to measure the facets themselves well. Instead they were chosen as described in the Construction section at the bottom of the page. As a result, these facets are unlikely to be measured super accurately. Facets that may be measured particularly badly include empathy, affectiveness, closeness, style, aesthetics, spirituality, and systematizing.

Test

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How well would you say the following statements apply to you?

Score me!

Construction

Using the ESCS data, I found a set of personality items with large gender differences. I then used factor analysis, guessing, and ad-hoc statistical methods to collect a sufficiently diverse subset of these items, making sure to cover as many domains as possible. Next, I collected data from SampleSize, and used linear discriminant analysis to create a score of similarity to men and women. To make sure that the score is not overestimated or underestimated due to overfitting, the LDA was split up so each participant's own results were not included in the data for fitting when their score was computed.

Many of the items used are highly stereotypical. This is a consequence of how the items to use were selected (by picking the ones that gave large gender differences in a relatively old sample). However, due to the fact that they have been fit to the reddit data, they will not be interpreted in as-stereotypical ways. In fact, many items are weighted the opposite of their stereotypes.

In addition to gender diagnosticity, this test also yields a measure of "effeminacy" and "masculinateness". These were constructed by using linear regression to predict respectively men's and women's self-perceived masculinity/femininity from their personality test answers. They can be thought of as being measures of stereotypical masculinity/femininity.

Another measure that the test yields is your "residualized" score. This is gender diagnosticity residualized for effeminacy and masculinateness; which is to say, I used linear regression to predict gender diagnosticity from stereotypical masculinity/femininity, and then subtracted this prediction from the original gender diagnosticity score. This yields a summary of what male-typical or female-typical traits you have that are not stereotypically masculine or feminine. This might be based on traits that have large and well-known gender differences in self-report, such as libido; and it may be based on traits that are subtly different between men and women; or it may more generally be based on anything except the stereotypical masculinity/femininity.

During the construction of this test, I tried to list a diverse subset of items, which I constructed mostly by generating various personality factors with gender differences. These factors are empathy, vulnerability, affectiveness, closeness, competitiveness, dominance, rule-conscientiousness, libido, thrill-seeking, boldness, style, aesthetics, spirituality, and systematizing. The items for the scales were collected in somewhat ad-hoc ways, and so they may not accurately represent the underlying traits. In addition, the items were selected based on which ones gave the largest gender differences in the ESCS sample, rather than which ones most accurately represent the traits. So - be careful in interpreting these! Regardless, since the data for them was available, I thought I might as well give you the results for them too.

Factor analysis suggested that these fourteen traits were all facets of two superfactors, which by their similarity to the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, I've labelled expressivity and instrumentality.