This is a test of how masculine or feminine your personality, work interests, media interests, childhood play, and sexuality is. It is constructed using a wide set of items across these domains, and has been calibrated using an internet survey on /r/SampleSize. If you wish to know more about how this test works, you can see the Construction section at the bottom of this page.
Disclaimers
This test does not claim to be measuring innate masculinity/femininity. In fact, research has indicated that the way you are raised has an effect on your masculinity/femininity, though it has not been tested for this specific test. On the other hand, some studies (e.g. 1, 2) provide compelling evidence that some of what this test measures represents innate masculinity/femininity, so realistically this test likely measures mixtures of innate and non-innate M/F.
This is not a "trans test", and it is neither designed nor intended to be one. In earlier iterations of the test, a lot of people have implicitly assumed that this test is about whether one is transgender, but this test has very little connection with affective gender identity, especially in males, as it instead focuses more broadly on masculinity/femininity.
Gender differences and cultural conceptions of masculinity/femininity are not constant across time and space, and so the test results likely depend on the sample the test has been calibrated for. The items for this test came from a variety of sources, mainly by taking ones that had particularly much gender difference. In addition to focusing on gender differences when selecting the items, there has also been a focus on gender norms, as these appear to be important for people's concepts of masculinity/femininity.
While many items in this test are related to gender norms, this test is not meant solely for measuring gender norms. For this, something like the Conformity to Masculine/Feminine Norms Inventory might be more relevant.
This test is incomplete in terms of measuring masculinity/femininity. It relies solely on the domains of personality, interests, and sexuality, but in reality other things, such as appearance, are also relevant for people's conceptions of masculinity/femininity. It appears to have a somewhat adequate cover on the domains that it does measure, but other domains are also often relevant. Also, "somewhat adequate" may be insufficient for some purposes; in some ways its cover on the measured domains is known to be inadequate; for instance, the sexuality variables are sort-of oddly chosen (I just used the ones I had most experience with studying), the personality variables could be made much broader, the media interests variables are so insufficient that they lack structural coherence, and the childhood play variables are too focused on very young forms of play.
This test has not been scientifically validated. It is part of an informal project aiming to eventually build a reliable measure of masculinity/femininity, and the end product of this project might hopefully become scientifically validated. However, the current test you can take here should essentially be seen as being for fun.
Test
But onto the test itself! It is divided up into five sections, personality, vocational interests, media interests, childhood play, and sexuality. Please answer all questions in all sections to obtain your score.
Construction
I considered several different domains of relevance. Personality is probably the domain most often assessed in masculinity/femininity measures (e.g. Bem Sex Role Inventory), but most only considered few aspects of personality. I used various methods to extract four gender-relevant personality dimensions, which I included in the test. Some research indicates that work interests is a major factor in masculinity/femininity, so I included them in the test too. Traditionally, childhood play is commonly used to measure m/f, so this was also something I decided to include. I was curious about whether media interests had some deeper unappreciated validity for measuring m/f, so I chose to include them too in the test. Finally, back when constructing this test, I read a study which indicated that sexuality was relevant too, so I included this too and expanded on the sexual interests considered.
To construct the test, I gathered data from /r/SampleSize and analyzed it. A summary of the analysis can be found here. Be warned that I'm a bit of an amateur, so the analysis is not the best (and as a result, neither is the test). The test provides three primary scores: effeminacy, masculinacy and gender diagnosticity. These have been constructed using models that predict self-assessed femininity in men, self-assessed masculinity in women, and gender in the analysis linked. The overall m/f score is a direct combination of the three.
When analyzing the data, I found evidence of 9 distinct subfactors, though in some cases the factors were quite weak. These are listed below the main scores. It's unclear what relevance they have, but they may prove useful in future research.
There also was some evidence that there were factors unrelated to masculinity/femininity, constituting "elevation" factors. The test shows two of these elevation factors, namely the overall elevation, labelled "activity", and the personality elevation, named "energy". It's a bit unclear whether the "energy" dimension has been named well (and even whether it exists), because it includes tidyness, which is not clearly high-energy or low energy.
Gallery
To make the test more interesting, I commisioned Asha Britt to paint some pictures representing different degrees of masculinity/femininity. They are some nice pictures, but because people only see one result, and because some of them are assigned to only 1% of respondents, I was worried they wouldn't be seen enough, and so I thought I would create a gallery for them. If you would like to use any of these pictures for another project, please contact me at tailcalled@gmail.com.
Each picture is associated with a masculinity/femininity score; the associated score can be seen in parentheses after the name. The specific class is decided by rounding off the main m/f result to the nearest integer.
