Measuring Intrapersonal Awareness of Nonverbal Behavior Associated With Gender: Development and Validation of the Gendered Mannerisms Scale

This study addresses the underexplored domain of self-reports of gendered nonverbal behaviors. We developed the Gendered Mannerisms Scale (GMS) to bridge self-perception and social perception of gendered nonverbal cues. Across three studies, the paper validates the GMS as a reliable self-report psychometric tool and determines which gendered nonverbal behaviors show consistent gender differences for cisgender heterosexual women and men in U.S. samples. The first two studies employed exploratory factor analysis with distinct samples from a U.S. data vendor platform to establish and replicate the GMS’s initial factor structure, demonstrating the scale’s robustness in capturing the self-reports of gendered nonverbal behaviors. The third study used a measurement invariance analysis with a community-based sample, further demonstrating the scale’s validity and its applicability to more racially/ethnically diverse and younger samples (than Studies 1 and 2). Finally, the four factors of self-reportable nonverbal gendered behavior consistently identified by the GMS are: (a) dynamic movements and open posture, (b) swaying gait, (c) gesticulations, and (d) closed posture. Importantly, the first factor (dynamic) may actually be more influenced by extraversion than gender.