page_title: Femininity
section_title: Behavior and personality
hierarchical_section_title: Femininity / Behavior and personality
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of a young woman, drawing. Thought to be a portrait of the artist herself. Français&#160;: Jeune femme dessinant, huile sur toile de Marie-Denise Villers (1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Précédemment attribué à Jacques-Louis David, le tableau serait un autoportrait.
context_page_description: Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls. Although femininity is socially constructed, research indicates that some behaviors considered feminine are biologically influenced. To what extent femininity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate. It is distinct from the definition of the biological female sex, as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits.
  Traits traditionally cited as feminine include gentleness, empathy, humility, and sensitivity, though traits associated with femininity vary across societies and individuals, and are influenced by a variety of social and cultural factors.
context_section_description: Traits such as nurturance, sensitivity, sweetness, supportiveness, gentleness, warmth, passivity, cooperativeness, expressiveness, modesty, humility, empathy, affection, tenderness, and being emotional, kind, helpful, devoted, and understanding have been cited as stereotypically feminine. The defining characteristics of femininity vary between and even within societies.
  The relationship between feminine socialization and heterosexual relationships has been studied by scholars, as femininity is related to women's and girls' sexual appeal to men. Femininity is sometimes linked with sexual objectification. Sexual passiveness, or sexual receptivity, is sometimes considered feminine while sexual assertiveness and sexual desire are sometimes considered masculine.
  Scholars have debated the extent to which gender identity and gender-specific behaviors are due to socialization versus biological factors. Social and biological influences are thought to be mutually interacting during development. Studies of prenatal androgen exposure have provided some evidence that femininity and masculinity are partly biologically determined. Other possible biological influences include evolution, genetics, epigenetics, and hormones (both during development and in adulthood).
  In 1959, researchers such as John Money and Anke Erhardt proposed the prenatal hormone theory. Their research argues that sexual organs bathe the embryo with hormones in the womb, resulting in the birth of an individual with a distinctively male or female brain; this was suggested by some to "predict future behavioral development in a masculine or feminine direction". This theory, however, has been criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds and remains controversial. In 2005, scientific research investigating sex differences in psychology showed that gender expectations and stereotype threat affect behavior, and a person's gender identity can develop as early as three years of age. Money also argued that gender identity is formed during a child's first three years.
  People who exhibit a combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics are considered androgynous, and feminist philosophers have argued that gender ambiguity may blur gender classification. Modern conceptualizations of femininity also rely not just upon social constructions, but upon the individualized choices made by women.
  Mary Vetterling-Braggin argues that all characteristics associated with femininity arose from early human sexual encounters which were mainly male-forced and female-unwilling, because of male and female anatomical differences. Others, such as Carole Pateman, Ria Kloppenborg, and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, argue that the definition of femininity is the result of how females must behave in order to maintain a patriarchal social system.
  In his 1998 book Masculinity and Femininity: the Taboo Dimension of National Cultures, Dutch psychologist and researcher Geert Hofstede wrote that only behaviors directly connected with procreation can, strictly speaking, be described as feminine or masculine, and yet every society worldwide recognizes many additional behaviors as more suitable to females than males, and vice versa. He describes these as relatively arbitrary choices mediated by cultural norms and traditions, identifying "masculinity versus femininity" as one of five basic dimensions in his theory of cultural dimensions. Hofstede describes as feminine behaviors such as "service", "permissiveness", and "benevolence", and describes as feminine those countries stressing equality, solidarity, quality of work-life, and the resolution of conflicts by compromise and negotiation.
  In Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology, the anima and animus are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The anima and animus are described by Jung as elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the uncons
caption: Young Woman Drawing (1801, Metropolitan Museum of Art) painted by Marie-Denise Villers (possibly a self-portrait), depicts an independent feminine spirit.[29]
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