The perks and pitfalls of conformity: unravelling the role of gender conformity in friendship satisfaction among adolescents

ABSTRACT

During adolescence young people not only strongly compare themselves with each other, they also monitor and judge each other based on gender norms. Therefore, this article focuses on the interpersonal dynamics of gender conformity among adolescents. The central research question is whether adolescents conform to gender norms in order to ‘fit in’? First, we study how adolescents come to internalise (pressure for gender conformity from oneself) and externalise gender norms (behaving in gender typical ways). Second, we assess the potential social benefits of gender conformity by studying the association between satisfaction with friendships and different aspects of gender conformity. Multi-group structural equation modelling was used to assess differences between adolescent girls (n = 631) and boys (n = 633) in Belgium (M_age= 19.52). Benevolent sexism predicted adolescents’ internalisation and externalisation of gender norms. For boys, the pressure for gender conformity from others predicted the externalisation of gender norms. In general, adolescents benefited from higher satisfaction with friendships when they endorsed benevolent sexism and translated normative pressures into gender typical behaviours. Our findings urge for increasing awareness to recognize subtle manifestations of sexism and to reduce the pressure young people experience to conform to gender norms.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• gender identity
• gender conformity
• benevolent sexism
• hostile sexism
• pressure for gender conformity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 With a sufficient sample size, as is the case here, the critical ratio resembles a normal distribution and can be used as a z-test for the difference between coefficients of the models being compared. This means that a value of 1.96 indicates two-tailed significance at the 5% level. In other words, if the critical ratio (CR) is > 1.96, the difference between both paths is statistically significant at p <0.05.

2 We followed the general guidelines for a good fit as presented by Schreiber et al. (2006). This implies that χ²/df should be smaller than 3, AGFI and CFI should both be higher than .95 and CFI and RMSEA should be smaller than .95.