(CN) — The Pew Research Center released a study Thursday that surveyed how Americans perceive national opinions on gender, especially masculinity.
Kim Parker, Pew’s director of social trends research, said in a phone interview that researchers asked respondents to answer how they thought others thought about gender, rather than what their own opinions were, to avoid people not answering questions honestly out of a fear of social repercussions.
Among the researchers’ key findings: Only about 25% of the survey’s 6,204 respondents reported thinking that their fellow Americans have a negative view of “masculine” men. Conversely, about 43% of people the researchers interviewed said Americans view “masculine” men positively.
Answers from individual respondents varied based on age, gender, race and other factors. The study did not lay out clear parameters for what defines “masculine” men, which Parker said was intentional.
“We didn’t define the terms for them. We let them bring their own conceptions of gender to the survey,” she said.
Michael Addis, a psychology professor with Massachusetts’ Clark University, worried that the lack of a definition for masculinity limited what the study could say about masculinity as a concept. But he added that what he called “a study of social perception” was still useful in and of itself.
“You’re asking people to think about what other people think about,” Addis said. “I think that kind of question is very useful because there’s a lot of questions about masculinity that haven’t been asked prior.”
One set of survey questions asked respondents to contrast their perception of national views on men being caring, open about their emotions and affectionate, with national views on men being confident, physically strong, assertive and risk-taking. Viewed through that lens, about 6 in 10 respondents said Americans undervalue the “softer” traits in men, while about 30 in 10 said “harder” traits in men were overvalued.
The researchers did ask survey participants to describe what they personally considered unacceptable behaviors in men; options ranged from “putting a lot of effort into… style and fashion choices” to “playing video games on a regular basis” to “joining in when other men talk about women in a sexual way.”
Here again, most respondents had disfavorable views of behaviors sometimes associated with “traditional” masculinity and expressed an openness toward changing gender roles. About 75% of all respondents, including 69% of men, said it is unacceptable for men to join other men in talking about women in a sexual way, for example. Fifty-seven percent said it’s acceptable for married men to be homemakers while their wife works for an income, and 62% — including 59% of men — said it’s unacceptable for men to throw a punch if provoked.
“The consensus seems to be, ‘let’s not pigeonhole people into these identities,’” Parker said.
The researchers noted a marked difference in perceptions of national attitudes toward masculinity between Democrats and Republicans. There was also a large gap between Republican and Democratic men in how masculine they perceived themselves to be. About 53% of Republican men who answered the survey consider themselves to be “highly masculine,” compared with just 29% of Democratic men. Women’s self-perception of their femininity was more consistent across party lines — 38% of Republican women and 32% of Democratic women who responded to the survey consider themselves “highly feminine.”
Among the 43% of respondents who said Americans have a positive view of masculine men, two-thirds of Republicans said this is a good thing, compared with only one-third of Democrats. Among the 25% who said Americans view masculine men negatively, 86% of Republicans said this is a bad thing, almost double the 45% of Democrats in the group who said the same.
The binary of “Republican” and “Democrat” cannot capture the full range of respondents’ political ideologies, but Parker said the party divide is nevertheless significant. It marked how some conservative perceptions of masculinity are moving away from the mainstream.
“From our survey, the answers of Republican men really stood out because they were such outliers,” Parker said.
Both Parker and Addis noted there were limitations to the study, including that it didn’t take into account respondents’ occupations, and how their relationship to work might shape their conception of gender. Addis remarked that labor could influence how men performed their masculinity, particularly if they lacked access to symbols of masculine wealth or status.
The study also excluded transgender and nonbinary people as a category of respondents. Parker said that LGBTQ people were included in the survey, but that there weren’t enough responses from nonbinary or transgender people specifically to collate into a separate category.
Addis acknowledged the methodological difficulty in isolating those responses, but said trans peoples’ experiences were important to study nevertheless. Many queer people move across gender lines that cisgender people may think of as inviolable, and he argued this provides insight into the factors that shape gender more broadly.
“The perspective of trans folks is vital to understand how gender works in the modern world,” he said.