Gender, Race, Social Class, and Self-Evaluations among College Students

The purpose of this study was to modify Heiss and Owens's (1972) formulation on trait differences in the self-evaluations of blacks and whites and integrate it with the literature on sex role socialization, thereby elaborating the instrumental-expressive dichotomy they proposed so as to generate and test hypotheses regarding race, gender, and SES differences in self-evaluations. University students rated themselves on a fifteen-item semantic differential scale. A principal component factor analysis with varimax rotations yielded five factors, three of the factors were seen as private-domain, one as public-domain, and one as mixed. A series of 2×2×2 ANOVAS indicated that (1) on the public-domain factor, black females rated themselves more positively than did the white females, while black males and white males did not differ; (2) blacks rated themselves more positively than did whites on two private-domain factors; (3) white females rated themselves more positively than did males on the private-domain factor indicative of a feminine stereotype; and (4) SES differences appeared on the private-domain factors in particular.