Daily gender expression is associated with psychological adjustment for some people, but mainly men

Abstract

To what extent does gender expression vary day-to-day? Are daily changes related to psychological adjustment in the same way for all individuals? A person-specific approach was used to answer these questions in a 75-day intensive longitudinal study. Fifty-seven cisgender adults (27 women) provided over 4000 reports of daily masculinity and femininity and of three indices of internalizing problems. Results revealed: (a) substantial daily fluctuations in gender expression, especially in women; (b) sample-level links between daily increases in femininity or reductions in masculinity and heightened anxiety, depression, and self-reproach for men, but no apparent links for women; and (c) person-specific links between gender expression and psychological adjustment, such that some women reported internalizing problems with reduced masculinity (average male pattern) and some men reported problems with heightened masculinity (opposite the average male pattern). Findings highlight how intensive longitudinal research can illuminate the uniqueness of gender-related daily experiences, and their implications for the wellbeing of individuals.

Figure 1

Line graph of daily gender expression (feminine-to-masculine continuum) for individual men (thin blue lines) and women (thin red lines) across the 75 days of the intensive longitudinal study. Thick dashed lines show trends averaging across participants of the same self-reported gender.

Figure 2

Scatterplot of person-specific correlations (residuals from first order autocorrelations) between daily gender expression (feminine-to-masculine continuum) and three indices of daily psychological adjustment: anxiety (purple circles), depression (orange squares), and self-reproach (green triangles). The y-axis depicts the strength of the correlations, and the x-axis depicts individual participants, with women (solid points) on the left and men (open points) on the right. Thick dashed lines at r = 0.10 and r = −0.10 demarcate a small effect size (Cohen, 1988), with correlations above and below the lines, respectively, reflecting meaningful individual-level correlations.