Sex, Gender Role, Attribution of Pathology, and Handwriting Tidiness

An archival study sampled personality test protocols with spontaneous handwriting specimens from 73 men and 168 women for signatures and scores on selected scales from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2. Judges applied a 5-point scale to sort signatures for tidiness. Interrater agreement was .93. The mean handwriting tidiness score for men was 1.8 and 2.8 for women, a significant difference of 1 point. Correlations between handwriting tidiness and MMPI–2 scores did not support the hypothesis that erratic handwriting is associated with pathology but scores for gender role correlated significantly with handwriting tidiness. Masculine Gender Role predicted sloppy penmanship and Feminine Gender Role predicted tidy writing, independent of the writers' biological sex.