Masculinity and Femininity

The Taboo Dimension of National Cultures

Geert Hofstede

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781506319476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In 1980, Geert Hofstede published his monumental work CultureÆs Consequences, which laid out four dimensions on which the differences among national cultures could be understood: individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity. Since then much research has been conducted and presented on individualism/collectivism but until now, no single volume has focused on the masculinity dimension of the model. In Masculinity and Femininity, Hofstede has expanded, sharpened, and deepened the discussion of masculinity and femininity. This new volume presents the first thoroughly developed discussion of this dimension and how it can help us understand the differences among cultures. It begins with a general explanation of masculinity and discusses how it illuminates broad features of different cultures. It then applies the dimension more specifically to gender, sexuality, and religion. Finally, the book examines how the masculinity dimension reveals a lot about a cultureÆs expressions of religious ideas, the importance its citizens attach to religion, and the way religious concepts are understood. Intended as a companion volume to KimÆs Individualism and Collectivism, this important volume will be of interest to those teaching courses such as cross-cultural psychology, international social welfare, international business, womenÆs studies, cultural studies, and the psychology of women.

PART I

MASCULINITY/ FEMININITY AS A NATIONAL CHARACTERISTIC

1

MASCULINITY/FEMININITY AS A DIMENSION OF CULTURE

Geert Hofstede

In this first chapter, Masculinity/Femininity (Mas/Fem) is introduced as one of five empirically derived dimensions of national cultures. The dimension, opposing ego-goals to social goals, was found in a factor analysis of work goals across the subsidiaries of a large multinational corporation in 40 countries. The label “Masculine/Feminine” was chosen for theoretical reasons that were empirically supported. Country Mas/Fem scores correlate with the results of a number of other studies; together these produce a picture of the implications of the dimension at the level of general norms, the family, the school, the workplace, politics, and ideas. Mas/Fem should not be confused with Individualism/Collectivism, nor should the cultural distinction be confused with differences in individual personality. Research on the implications of Mas/Fem continues. Two common problems are that different respondent categories may need different ways of measuring and that Mas/Fem differences are sometimes hidden behind other influences, such as differences in national wealth. Mas/Fem differences have deep historical roots and are unlikely to disappear in the future.

A CASE OF VIKING CULTURE SHOCK

At 3:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in June, Barry Kline sailed into the office of Ove Rasmussen in downtown Copenhagen. Barry was manager of human resource development for Nanny Brow Inc., a major multinational food corporation. Ove was human resource manager of the Danish subsidiary.

Barry came straight from the airport, carrying a clothes bag and a heavy leather briefcase. He had just flown in from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the corporate headquarters was located. He had, in fact, made an appointment with Ove for 9:00 a.m. that morning, assuming that he would land at 7:15. Because of a mechanical defect, his plane had been grounded in Minneapolis for 7 hours and arrived as many hours late. He had jumped into a taxi and hurried to the office.

At the time, Barry was spearheading a new Performance Improvement Program across all the subsidiaries. He had counted on a day of briefing with Ove and on seeing the other managers of Nanny Brow Denmark early in the next week.

“Man, you must be dead tired,” said Ove when he had heard Barry’s story. “Have some of our strong coffee.” Barry pretended to feel fine and burst into the essentials of his new program, which he knew very well by now. Ove listened carefully, made extensive notes, and asked pointed questions. Barry felt pleased.

At 5:05 p.m., Ove excused himself, dialed a number, and said something in Danish. “That was my home,” he said. “I got permission until six.” The discussion continued. At 6:05, Ove got up and asked, “Shall I drop you off at your hotel? I have to put the children to bed. My wife has a council meeting; she is in politics.”

In the car, Barry proposed to continue the discussion on Saturday. Ove said, “I promised to take the children to the zoo. Why don’t you come and join us? We’ll keep business until Monday.”

Barry muttered something about still wanting to work on his presentation to the general manager. The two men parted uneasily at the hotel.

In spite of his fatigue, Barry slept badly. What was wrong with Ove Rasmussen that he did not understand the need for putting in an extra effort? Barry’s first explanation was that Ove had a low work ethic and hated to work overtime, but during international staff meetings, Ove had always shown himself to be a hard worker. A second explanation was that Ove disliked corporate headquarters imposing unsolicited programs on him and had seized the opportunity to resist, but he had looked genuinely interested. A third ugly possibility was that Ove simply disliked Americans—but then why would he work for a U.S. multinational?

In fact, Ove’s goals in life in this story obviously differ somewhat from Barry’s. He sometimes attaches different priorities. Family comes before work more often, and under more circumstances, than for Barry, and he is not ashamed of that. This difference will have something to do with Ove’s and Barry’s personalities, but more to do with the different national cultures in which they were born, grew up, live, and work.

DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL CULTURES

My household definition of “culture” is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1980,¹ p. 260). “Culture” is a fuzzy concept. At least two meanings are frequently confused: (a) culture in the narrow sense of “civilization” and its products, and (b) culture in the anthropological sense of broad patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting, which includes much more than “civilization” alone. My definition obviously refers to the second meaning.

In Culture’s Consequences (Hofstede, 1980), I collected empirical evidence of differences in culture (as defined above) among 40 nations in the modern world. The differences found do not imply that everyone in these nations shares the same mental programming. In fact, what I considered to be “national cultures” were dominant mental programs, those shared by the majority of the middle classes of these countries. I justified this choice by the argument that the middle classes serve as the stabilizing element in national societies (Hofstede, 1980, p. 95).

Mental programs can include a lot of things, from religious beliefs, food preferences, and aesthetic choices to attitudes toward authority; I have distinguished them into symbols, heroes, rituals, and values, in which symbols are the most specific and values the most general (Hofstede, 1991, p. 7ff). I defined “values” as “broad tendencies to prefer certain states of affairs over others” (Hofstede, 1991, p. 263). Cross-national patterns in mental programs can be more easily distinguished at the general level of values than at the more specific levels of symbols, heroes, and rituals (summarized under the label “practices”). My research on national culture differences was therefore based on the study of values, self-scored by matched samples from the populations of the nations studied.

The message of Culture’s Consequences is that the cultures of the 40 countries could be positioned on four, largely independent, dimensions:

1. Power Distance (unequal versus equal),
2. Uncertainty Avoidance (rigid versus flexible),
3. Individualism/Collectivism (alone versus together), and
4. Masculinity/Femininity (tough versus tender).

The number of countries studied was later increased to 50, plus three multicountry regions (Hofstede, 1983, 1991). After continued research, a fifth dimension, Long/Short Term Orientation, was added (Hofstede, 1991, Chapter 7; Hofstede & Bond, 1988).

THE MASCULINITY/ FEMININITY DIMENSION

This book is devoted to the results of research about the dimension of masculinity versus femininity, abbreviated as Mas/Fem. Masculinity stands for a society in which men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success; women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life. The opposite pole, Femininity, stands for a society in which both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life (Hofstede, 1991, pp. 261-262).

The Mas/Fem dimension was originally identified from a section in the values questionnaire that asked for the importance to the respondent, in an imaginary ideal job, of 14 work goals: challenge, (living in a) desirable area, earnings, cooperation (with colleagues), training, (fringe) benefits, recognition, physical (working) conditions, freedom, (job) security, (career) advancement, use of skills, (relationship with) manager, and personal time (for personal or family life). The questionnaires were answered by matched samples of employees in different national subsidiaries of the IBM corporation around 1970. These samples represented very narrow and specific slices from the national populations, but they had the advantage of being extremely well matched—same company culture, same jobs, same education levels, and only minor differences in age and gender composition—but with different nationalities. The surveys in IBM were held twice, with an interval of about 4 years; only those questions were retained for analysis for which the rank orders of country mean scores remained stable over this period (Hofstede, 1980, chapter 2). The number of respondents per country for either survey round for the initial 40 countries was at least 50; in the later extension to other countries, this limit was lowered to 20 (Hofstede, 1983). The validity of the IBM samples for conclusions about national societies as a whole was not a matter of assumption: It was tested by correlating the country scores obtained against a host of other measurable characteristics of the countries, collected by other researchers for other purposes and unrelated to IBM.

The answers to the 14 “work goals” questions were scored on 5-point scales, with answer categories from 1= of utmost importance to 5 = of very little or no importance. The country answer scores were a stratified mean across seven occupational groups (every group carrying equal weight) and averaged for the first and the second survey round. The occupational group mean scores had been standardized across the 14 goals first. Standardizing is a mathematical operation in which each score in a set (in our case, a set of 14) is replaced by a z score, that is, its deviation from the common mean of all (14) scores divided by the common standard deviation. Standardizing the scores for each group eliminates differences between groups in response set, that is, the tendency to score any question higher or lower, regardless of its content. Standardizing also eliminates differences resulting from a greater or lesser use of the extreme answer categories from one group to another.

TABLE 1.1

Factors Found in an Analysis of Mean Scores on the Importance of 14 Work Goals Across 40 Countries

Factor 1 Individual/Collective	Factor 2 Social/Ego
Positive Personal time Freedom Challenge^b Desirable area^b	Positive Manager Cooperation^a Desirable area^a Security
Negative Training Physical conditions Use of skills^a Benefits Cooperation^b	Negative Earnings Recognition Advancement Challenge^a Use of skills^b

---

SOURCE: Hofstede (1980, p. 241).

a. First loading.

b. Second loading.

With 14 goals and 40 countries, the answers to the “work goals” questions produced a 14 (variables) × 40 (cases) matrix. This matrix was subjected to a varimax factor analysis with orthogonal rotation. This is a heuristic statistical device that allows a search for the smallest possible number of independent underlying factors. Factors are new variables able to explain a maximum amount of the total variance in the original matrix in the simplest, most parsimonious way.

The work goals matrix produced two such factors, of which the first was labeled Individual/Collective and the second Social/Ego. The first accounted for 24% of the total variance of the country means, the second for 22%. The distribution of the 14 goals over the two factors is s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Preface
• Part I: Masculinity/Femininity As A National Characteristic
• Part II: Culture And Gender
• Part III: Culture, Sexuality, And Religion
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Authors