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1. Introduction
Gender identity is an integrated element of self-concept that has important implications not only on an individual’s gender development but also his or her psychological adjustment [1–3]. Traditionally, researchers defined gender identity as one’s identification and acceptance of him or herself [4, 5]. However, from a more contemporary perspective, gender identity has been conceptualized as a multidimensional construct which contains a variety of gender-related personality traits, attitudes, and behaviors. For example, Spence argued that the underlying structure of gender identity includes not only a basic psychological sense of belongingness to one’s own sex, but also other factors reflecting an integrated, high-ordered appraisal about being male or female [2].
Based on Spence’s work [2], Egan and Perry [6] proposed a multidimensional gender identity model, in which gender identity was conceptualized to have four different aspects: (a) membership knowledge, or one’s awareness of being male or female (i.e., the traditional view of gender identity); (b) gender compatibility, defined as self-perceived gender typicality (i.e., similarity to other members of the same gender category) and feelings of contentment with one’s gender; (c) felt pressure for conforming to gender stereotypes; (d) intergroup bias, the belief that one’s own sex is superior to the other sex. The authors further assumed that these dimensions are more or less independent of each other and affect children’s psychological adjustment. Egan and Perry developed a self-reported questionnaire to measure gender compatibility, felt pressure to conform to gender stereotypes, and intergroup bias [6]. The first dimension, membership knowledge, was not included in the measure because it had been well studied. Through exploratory factor analyses (EFA), the gender compatibility scale was broken into two aspects: gender typicality and gender contentment. Based on these results, they proposed a four-factor model of gender identity with the other two factors entitled felt pressure of gender conformity and intergroup bias.
Egan and Perry’s model [6] and the psychometric properties of the measure they developed were subsequently supported by a series of studies [7–9]. For example, in a two-year longitudinal study, Yunger and colleagues [9] found that intercorrelations among the four dimensions were generally independent of each other and all the four scales had satisfying scale score reliability (Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.70 to 0.85) and test-retest reliability (ranging from...