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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between sex-role orientation and intellectual achievement, vocational interest areas, and susceptibility to arousal of motivation on an intellectual task.
Three hypotheses were tested: (1) that there would be a relationship between sex-role orientation and intellectual achievement as measured by the American College Testing Program's ACT scores; (2) that there would be a relationship between sex-role orientation and the six vocational interest areas of Holland's Self-Directed Search; (3) that women with a low masculine component in their sex-role orientation would be more likely than high-masculine women to improve their scores on an intellectual task in response to greater degrees of motivation arousal by an external agent.
The sample consisted of 117 undergraduate females in an introductory Educational Psychology course for the achievement study. Twenty-one women were added from the same pool for the other two research questions for a total of 138.
The measures were the ACT scores, the Self-Directed Search (SDS), and an analogies test constructed by the investigator. The Bem Sex Role Inventory was used in a revised version constructed by the investigator because eight published studies reveal a fairly consistent factor structure suggesting a more appropriate assignment of items to scales. This revised inventory was used to create a median split and assign subjects to four sex-role classifications. The achievement and motivation arousal studies were analyzed by an analysis of variance procedure, and a chi-square test was used in the vocational interest study.
No significant differences in intellectual achievement were found between sex-role orientations. One interaction effect reached significance (p < .003), but this finding disappeared when the sex-role orientations were constructed with the original Bem Sex Role Inventory items. This demonstrated the problem of the comparability of sex-role findings based on different instruments when there is such limited agreement between sex-role inventories on the assignment of subjects to the four sex-role categories.
The motivation study employed three levels of external exhortation to do well on the task, but no significant difference in the mean scores was found among the three arousal levels. It seems most likely that the experimental manipulation did not produce true motivational differences within the subjects.
The vocational interest study revealed an overwhelming endorsement of the social area (77%) as the subjects' first choice on the SDS. This was congruent with these subjects having education majors and being in a teacher's college--a social vocational area. The research hypothesis was affirmed at the second level of SDS preference, where there was a significant (p < .01) tendency for females with a high-masculine component in their sex-role orientation to indicate a preference for male-dominated vocational areas. The implications of these findings are that counselors having female clients with a traditional sex role identity should expect to provide encouragement if it is desirable or necessary for the client to pursue a career in male-dominated fields. Just what counselor actions will prove to be "encouraging," however, are not yet demonstrated.
