Psychological androgyny and creativity: Dynamics of gender-role and personality trait

We investigated the involvement of gender-role and personality traits in a cluster of tests to ascertain individuals’ creative ability. Participants were 200 students at Karlstad University. Five gender-role types, based upon masculinity/femininity scales were derived, namely the androgynic, stereotypic, retrotypic, midmost, and undifferentiated types. Results indicated that the androgynic group scored higher than the other groups on creativity, creative attitude (trend), dispositional optimism and graffiti/scrawling – with the exception of the stereotypic group which scored non-significantly higher on optimism. Nor was the androgynic group significantly different from the retrotypic group with respect to creativity – although this group scored significantly higher than did the stereotypic group. Small, or negligible, gender differences were found on the masculinity/femininity scales.