Gender Identity In Shanghai University Students

This paper started from the perspective of social-psychology, culturology as well as anthropology to explore gender identity among Shanghai university students. China is a traditionally masculine society, but due to the influence of present social changes, the behavior of youth, and their expectations toward themselves and the opposite sex are being modified from gender stereotypes. With this curiosity, the author's main hypothesis is that even there is an increasing trend for Chinese youth to develop androgynous attributes, but the number of them is limited and gender stereotypes are still influential. Three sub-hypotheses are as follows: the expectations of females and males toward the opposite sex still first maintain the attributes of traditional Chinese gender stereotypes; in females' desired selves, they tend to develop masculine qualities that are endorsed and supported by society; and the distance between actual and desired self for females is larger than for males. A broad literature review from both Chinese and English sources serves to review the gender evolution in China and its international research perspectives. After integrating the widely used testing instruments for gender both in China and the world, an Adjective Checklist with 80 items was designed to test the gender stereotypes held by Shanghai university students, their self report, as well as the characteristics preferred in the opposite sex. The research was completed with two studies, one for the test of gender stereotypes, the other for the test of self-report and description of the opposite sex. The collected data was analyzed in both qualitative and quantitative ways to support her hypotheses. At the end of this paper, an intercultural comparison is made between Chinese and American data in these respects.