I’m losing a lot of confidence in the digit ratio/masculinity femininity stuff. I’m not seeing a number of things I’d expect to see.
First, my numbers for correlations don’t match up with yours. With filters on for female gendered, and answering all of BemSexRoleF, BemSexRoleM, RightHand, and LeftHand, I get a correlation of only −0.34 for RightHand and BemSexRoleM, not −0.433 as you say. I get various other differences as well, all weaker correlations than you describe. Perhaps differences in filtering explain this? -.34 vs -.433 seems to be high for this to be true though.
Second, Bem masculinity and femininity actually seem to have a positive correlation, albeit tiny. So more masculine people are… more feminine? This makes no sense and makes me more likely to throw out the entire data set.
Thirdly, I don’t see any huge differences between Cisgender Men, Transgender Men, Cisgender Women, or Transgender Women on digit ratios. I would expect to see this as well. I get 95% confidence intervals (mean +/- 3*sigma/sqrt(n), formatted [Lower Right—Upper Right / Lower Left—Upper Left]) for the categories as follows:
F (Cis): [0.949 − 0.996 / 0.956 − 1.004]
M (Cis): [0.962 − 0.978 / 0.963 − 0.979]
M (Trans): [0.907 − 0.988 / 0.818 − 1.070]
F (Trans): [0.935 − 1.002 / 0.935 − 1.019]
There’s pretty significant overlap between all 4 categories. I made a dotplot that I can’t upload and it doesn’t look to me like there’s any difference in the distributions, but I don’t think we have enough of a sample size to have a meaningful distribution on anything except cis males and maybe cis females.
Lastly, I guess I just skipped over the favorite LessWrong post? Not sure what I would have answered, but it would have been either When None Dare Urge Restraint or Intellectual Hipsters and Metacontrarians. Surprised to see neither of those on the list.
There isn’t necessarily any problem with a small positive correlation between masculinity and femininity. The abstract of what I think is the original paper (I couldn’t find an ungated version) says that “The dimensions of masculinity and femininity are empirically and logically independent.”
It’s not clear that this maps to colloquial use of the terms “feminine” and “masculine” then. I think most would consider them opposite ends of the same spectrum.
There are aspects of the Western gender roles that are opposed to each other at least to some extent: emotionality vs. stoicism, active vs. passive romantic performance. But there are also aspects that aren’t. Blue is not anti-pink. Skill at sewing doesn’t forbid skill at fixing cars. These might resolve in people’s perceptions to positions on some kind of spectrum of male vs. female presentation, but they won’t show up that way on surveys measuring conformity with stereotype.
Indeed, that suggests a possible mechanism for these results. Assume for a moment that people prefer to occupy some particular point on the perception spectrum. But people often like stuff for reasons other than gender coding, so it’ll sometimes happen that people will be into stuff with gender coding inconsistent with how they’d prefer to be seen. That creates pressure to take up other stuff with countervailing coding. If people respond to that pressure, the net result is a weak positive correlation between stuff with masculine and feminine coding.
I’m losing a lot of confidence in the digit ratio/masculinity femininity stuff. I’m not seeing a number of things I’d expect to see.
First, my numbers for correlations don’t match up with yours. With filters on for female gendered, and answering all of BemSexRoleF, BemSexRoleM, RightHand, and LeftHand, I get a correlation of only −0.34 for RightHand and BemSexRoleM, not −0.433 as you say. I get various other differences as well, all weaker correlations than you describe. Perhaps differences in filtering explain this? -.34 vs -.433 seems to be high for this to be true though.
Second, Bem masculinity and femininity actually seem to have a positive correlation, albeit tiny. So more masculine people are… more feminine? This makes no sense and makes me more likely to throw out the entire data set.
Thirdly, I don’t see any huge differences between Cisgender Men, Transgender Men, Cisgender Women, or Transgender Women on digit ratios. I would expect to see this as well. I get 95% confidence intervals (mean +/- 3*sigma/sqrt(n), formatted [Lower Right—Upper Right / Lower Left—Upper Left]) for the categories as follows:
F (Cis): [0.949 − 0.996 / 0.956 − 1.004]
M (Cis): [0.962 − 0.978 / 0.963 − 0.979]
M (Trans): [0.907 − 0.988 / 0.818 − 1.070]
F (Trans): [0.935 − 1.002 / 0.935 − 1.019]
There’s pretty significant overlap between all 4 categories. I made a dotplot that I can’t upload and it doesn’t look to me like there’s any difference in the distributions, but I don’t think we have enough of a sample size to have a meaningful distribution on anything except cis males and maybe cis females.
Lastly, I guess I just skipped over the favorite LessWrong post? Not sure what I would have answered, but it would have been either When None Dare Urge Restraint or Intellectual Hipsters and Metacontrarians. Surprised to see neither of those on the list.
Edit: As always, thanks for doing this!
There isn’t necessarily any problem with a small positive correlation between masculinity and femininity. The abstract of what I think is the original paper (I couldn’t find an ungated version) says that “The dimensions of masculinity and femininity are empirically and logically independent.”
https://pdf.yt/d/zguK1Egu2kFycsA- / https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ky5snzyteftmz2/1974-bem.pdf
It’s not clear that this maps to colloquial use of the terms “feminine” and “masculine” then. I think most would consider them opposite ends of the same spectrum.
There are aspects of the Western gender roles that are opposed to each other at least to some extent: emotionality vs. stoicism, active vs. passive romantic performance. But there are also aspects that aren’t. Blue is not anti-pink. Skill at sewing doesn’t forbid skill at fixing cars. These might resolve in people’s perceptions to positions on some kind of spectrum of male vs. female presentation, but they won’t show up that way on surveys measuring conformity with stereotype.
Indeed, that suggests a possible mechanism for these results. Assume for a moment that people prefer to occupy some particular point on the perception spectrum. But people often like stuff for reasons other than gender coding, so it’ll sometimes happen that people will be into stuff with gender coding inconsistent with how they’d prefer to be seen. That creates pressure to take up other stuff with countervailing coding. If people respond to that pressure, the net result is a weak positive correlation between stuff with masculine and feminine coding.