Gender identification
Gender identification
Millennials came of age at a time of rapidly shifting gender identity norms. Previous generations
pioneered dramatic changes in rights and roles
that brought increasing parity between women
and men, but as the 20th century turned to the
21st, Americans increasingly questioned whether
they should be limited to thinking about gender in
static, binary terms. Suddenly, the English lexicon
expanded to include terms like cisgender, transgender, nonbinary, and genderqueer.
In contrast with racial identification, though,
social surveys and government data collection
have been slower to adapt to changing conceptions
of gender. Options to identify beyond “female” and
“male” or “man” and “woman” remain limited and
were generally not available to millennials when
they were applying to college or their first jobs.7
When such options are included in surveys,
they are quite frequently embraced. One recent
study with expanded gender measures found that
when respondents are offered separate scales to
describe their femininity and masculinity, most do
not fit in an all-or-nothing model of gender with
two distinct and opposite dimensions. That is,
most women surveyed did not see themselves as
being “very” feminine and “not at all” masculine,
and most men surveyed did not see themselves as
being “very” masculine and “not at all” feminine.
Furthermore, about 1 in 10 respondents reported
seeing themselves as either equally feminine and
masculine or gender nonconforming (i.e., with
lower scores on their gender-typical scale than
