Gender Conformity and Wellbeing: An Experiment in Ordering Effects

Aliya Saperstein, Stanford University
Tagart Sobotka, University of California-Santa Barbara

Gender disparities in health, between women and men, are widespread and well known. However, growing use of more inclusive gender measures allows for expanding our understanding not only to additional categories such as transgender or nonbinary people but also to variation within categories, by perceived femininity and masculinity. In this study, we use nonbinary categorical and gradational gender measures and a survey experiment to tease apart whether perceptions of gender influence reported wellbeing and vice versa. We find evidence of a bidirectional relationship, with both reported gender perceptions and wellbeing affected by question order. We also find that people who experience larger gaps between their gender self-conception and how most people see them report worse wellbeing, especially when they were first asked to reflect on their gender. Our results are consistent across two samples of U.S. adults: a nationally representative sample and a targeted sample of gender and sexual minorities.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, Data and Methods, Health and Morbidity, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination

See extended abstract.