V.D. Povzun, professor, Dr.Hab.
A.A. Povzun, associate professor, Ph.D.
V.V. Apokin, associate professor, Ph.D.
V.Yu. Losev, associate professor, Ph.D.
Surgut State University, Surgut

Key words: sex-role socialization, sexual behavior, sex-role identity, gender preferences, gender roles, interpersonal choice.

The problem of sex-role socialization is a process that determines man’s gender identity and formation of limits of the so-called sexual behavior, namely behavior specific for a particular sex - is getting increasingly relevant today [5], and the need to take into account the gender specifics provokes the need to organize political [2] and economic [1] strategies, settle social issues [3], sports [7, 8] and health [4, 9]  issues, organize everyday and family relationships [11], education [10], science [6] and a number of other issues.

The last two decades of the twentieth century became for the Russian society a period of crisis associated with the breaking of the usual stereotypes in the style and way of life, political and especially economic lifestyle that eventually led to the need for re-evaluation of the established norms of social life and primarily affected the human relationships, an integral part of which is the relationships between men and women which have traditionally been considered as gender relations. The changes taking place in society have led to the realization that the biological sex characteristics cannot be the only explanation for the difference of social roles of males and females, existing in different societies, and as a result, the notion of "gender" has occurred, referring to the combination of social and cultural norms that society expects people to perform depending on their biological sex. Today, it is definitely not the biological sex and socio-cultural norms that ultimately determine the psychological qualities, behavior patterns, activities, occupations of men and women. Being a man or a woman in a society does not mean merely having this or that anatomical feature - it means to perform certain gender roles prescribed to us, formed and developed under the influence of the society, culture and embodied in them understanding of the content and specificity of these roles.

The content of gender roles in the course of historical development of society undergoes changes [12], nowadays rather fast ones, enabling people to less rigidly adhere to the existing sex-role norms and move freely from traditionally female occupations and behavior patterns to traditionally male ones, and vice versa. Such development indicates the split or fragmentary nature of the gender roles [13] and makes the person who becomes a member of society, face quite difficult choices, in our case - sex-role oriented choices.

In this regard, it is clear that taking into account features of gender-role stereotypes of each generation, and moreover their formation in a direction acceptable to society, is an important social problem, and educational institutions play in this process, if not the main, then a rather significant role. The solution of this problem requires first and foremost understanding of the problem, especially as now we start to realize that young people are not only the object of education, but also the subject of social action that requires a fundamentally different type of social policy, and institutions of higher education can be one of the places for its implementation.

Against the background of the negative tendencies it becomes especially important to study means of harmonization of intersexual dialogue that would contribute to a more complete disclosure of the personal potential of both men and women, the effective use of creative talents of each individual. The closest to a person is the problem of interpersonal communication, of the traditional sex-role choices which, in the light of the above mentioned changes in the society, becomes extremely difficult. In this regard, the problem of tolerance becomes all the more urgent and the problem of gender education becomes increasingly undefined.

Interpersonal gender choice is primarily the criteria by which people of one sex choose a life partner of the opposite sex. Hence, in order to be chosen, a person must display certain qualities that he believes reflect the dignity of his gender and as a result provides gender success. In other words, a person should look in the eyes of the opposite sex "like a true man" or "a true woman".

We will not say now about the development of these qualities, it is a separate problem: what parents should bring up in their children, telling them - "you're a boy" or "you're a girl". We tried to evaluate the result of the combined effect of modern society on gender preferences of today's young people, that is to identify the qualities that these modern young people consider important for their gender success and expect from the opposite sex, as well as to assess the success of this expectations, that is whether the opposite sex considers these qualities significant. The question is extremely important, in our view, because, in terms of human values, the success rate of such a choice today is quite low and continues to decline. As a result, the attitude to gender values becomes frankly nihilistic, and a strictly gender success is increasingly replaced by sexual, which by and large is not the same.

The problem is that the criteria of "correctness" in modern society are significantly blurred, and the most important institutions of education, including family, are weakened. It results in the blurred patterns of social behavior - a specific set of requirements, expectations imposed by society to male and female individuals, which undoubtedly leads to the disruption of the sex-role socialization - the process of forming male or female gender identity in accordance with the accepted in a given society cultural norms. This disruption results in inevitable errors in the demonstration of their own gender role, as well as in the assessment of the adequacy of such a role in the ones of the opposite sex. Consequently, it is necessary to control over the process of a person's entering the cultural norms of behavior and relations between men and women. Moreover, the control, which would enable not only the society, but also the person to determine the level and direction of his sex-role socialization which would help him adequately monitor and adjust his sex-role behavior. The method of self-evaluation is one of the most accessible and adequate methods of organization of control over such a process.

The purpose of the study was to identify gender specifics of sex-role preferences of interpersonal choice in university students.

Materials and methods. In the study, the participants were asked to, massively and independently from each other, name at least ten adjectives characterizing representatives of their own and the opposite sex, that ensure their gender success. The boys and girls were surveyed separately. The survey involved up to 200 boys and 300 girls. In total, there were named about 150 adjectives, some of which were encountered only once, some had nothing to do with the personal qualities, and some were of frankly provocative nature. Therefore, 20 of the most common qualities were separately chosen from the resulting lists for male and female groups, the connection between which in each group with respect to "ideal" and "real" representatives of their own and the opposite sex was estimated by the method of Spearman’s rank correlation.

Results and discussion. The data obtained at this stage clearly showed that most of the values were outside optimal self-esteem, mainly being low self-esteem, namely below the "average" level, which itself is a poor indicator due to its extremely negative impact on social behavior. Inadequate self-esteem can cause a gender conflict.

The gender conflict is caused by the contradiction between the normative notions about personality traits and the peculiarities of male and female behavior and the inability or unwillingness of an individual to comply with these notions-requirements. This conflict reflects the contradiction between the personality substructures, "Self-image as an individual" and "Self-image as a representative of a gender group". Any gender conflict is based on the sex role differentiation and the hierarchy of statuses of men and women and is the result of discriminatory practices that exist in modern societies. Excessively high or low self-esteem disrupts the process of self-management, distorts self-control, people with high and low self-esteem are more often the cause of conflicts. In the case of high self-esteem – due to the neglectful and disrespectful attitude towards other people, in the case of low self-esteem - because of the excessive criticality of these people. Both cases can cause irreconcilable contradictions in organization of interpersonal communication in general, as well as in organization of personal relationships in particular [4].

However, such a result, while also confirming the existence of the conflict and in most cases of the dissatisfaction of the respondents with the attitude to their own and the opposite sex, yet did not help us identify any meaningful hierarchy of qualities exhibited by the representatives of each sex for their gender success and also evaluate the success of this presentation, and, therefore, find a contradiction between them.

To answer this question, we, using the ranking of qualities of "ideal" and "real" representatives of both genders that has already been done earlier during self-evaluation, made a stepwise summation of the same twenty qualities presented and expected by the representatives of each gender based on their significance, that is the frequency of putting those qualities to a certain place. The speed with which this number decreases reflects the degree of significance of the given quality for the group of subjects and furthermore reveals primary and secondary important qualities as characteristics, serving the basis for the sex role choice. An example of such analysis in one of the groups of girls, assessing the quality of an "ideal" representative of their own gender is presented in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1. Change of the frequency of putting qualities on a ranked place in the characterization of an “ideal” girl by girls.

Judging by the first position, young girls consider femininity, intelligence and beauty by far the most popular and therefore important for being a success with men. And it is absolutely expected. All the other positions are far behind. However, there is a gradual increase in popularity of other qualities, which makes us clearly see their priority and, therefore, understand what will be presented if the first qualities are or are not appreciated, what are the first and the last qualities to be demonstrated, according to a girl. Thus, an "ideal" girl shows sexuality, openness, and mysteriousness last of all, which is unexpected in some sense.

For better clarity, we could have constructed the curves of the rise of popularity of certain qualities, but we will give only a table showing the importance of the qualities in the first three, five, ten and fifteen places. Assessment after fifteen places is hardly possible, since the totals of all the qualities begin to level off. For the same reason, in our case, it is pointless to assess more than twelve qualities.

Table 2. The distribution of the importance of qualities according to the total of ranking places in the characterization of an “ideal” girl by girls

Taking into account that the self-assessment method reveals the hierarchy of qualities not only for a "real" but for an "ideal" representative of gender, the result could be very broadly analyzed and used, and in our case show not only the discrepancy between the expected and the displayed qualities of representatives of each gender in the anticipation of gender success, but also see the reasons for this discrepancy.

Table. 3 shows the result we have obtained that reflects the peculiarities of their own and the opposing sex-role preferences expressed by both sexes with respect to "ideal” (N1) and "real” (№ 2) representatives of gender, calculated and assessed by the total of fifteen first places.

We note only some of the features that are important particularly for the student environment.

Table 3. The hierarchy of qualities reflecting the peculiarities of sex-role preferences of interpersonal choice among the students of Surgut State University

The first thing worth noting is the lack in those significant qualities of even a hint on the value of health. There is no mentioning of such quality even in the ideal case. And that is in the group consisting predominantly of medical students. We can assume with certainty that the behavior patterns aimed at a healthy lifestyle are also lacking.

Girls believe that an ideal girl should be, above all, feminine, but for a real girl femininity is in the second half of the list. This is understandable, given that femininity is a virtual concept and has no numerically measurable evaluation criteria, and thus is practically unattainable. We can only sympathize with the girls striving to it and be glad that the other criteria such as smart, thoughtful, kind are matching.

The situation with the characteristic "beautiful" is even less understandable. It is quite natural that girls do not see it in the real representatives of their gender, but it is surprising that, considering an endemic desire of women to be beautiful, this quality is on the 12th place in the ideal characterization! Of course, the characteristic "beautiful" is in the top of the first places (as well as "femininity"), but it loses ground in the end. So, femininity is ultimately associated with some other qualities, as femininity is present in the list of real qualities but beauty is not!

Ideal boys also do not consider girls' beauty an important quality, although these are beautiful girls whom they see around themselves. Ideally, boys want to see well-mannered, attractive, honest girls. But they only see attractive and beautiful (and probably therefore attractive). Boys don’t meet honest and well-mannered girls in real life. Such a situation should affect girls primarily because, as we expected, it clearly reflects the orientation to sexual (short-term), and not gender (long-term) success.

However, the situation is even more difficult among girls; they want to see an intelligent, loving and faithful boy and do not see any of these qualities in the real boys!

Conclusion. Our findings are just food for thought for educational institutions responsible for organization of educational activities, so that changes could be made in family relationships, especially for young people themselves who are to change value orientations in search of each other to be understood, seen and evaluated by their potential "soul mate". Otherwise, the expanding today gender nihilism, i.e. general reluctance to join any relationship other than sexual, and recriminations such as "all of them are such..." are inevitable.

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Corresponding author: apokin_vv@mail.ru