KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Male gender role is known to cause psychological dysfunctions such as depression, stresses, and low self-esteem. Therefore, it is required to assess the degree of Korean men's gender role conflict and its correlation with the psychological dysfunctions. For this purpose, we developed the Korean Male Gender Role Conflict Scale and using this scale, analyzed the relationship between male gender role conflict and depression, stresses and self-esteem. The Korean male gender role conflict scale is constituted with 37 items and has six factors such as male superiority(28.2%), work and family relation(9.0%), success, power, competition(7.7%), restrictive emotionality(6.4%), family head responsibility (4.8%), restrictive affectionate behavior between men(3.9%). All six factors explain 60.2% of the total variance. As the result of the correlation analyses show, Korean male gender role conflict is significantly correlated to all the psychological variables mentioned above. Stress is most strongly correlated at the level of .296(p ＜ .01) and depression is correlated at .276(p ＜ .01). Self-esteem is negatively correlated at the level of -.166. Among stresses, financial stress is most strongly correlated at the level of .226(p ＜ .01) and health stress is least strongly correlated at .128(p ＜ .01). We propose to utilize the Korean male gender role conflict scale for the purpose of self-assessment of men's gender role conflict and in the occasions of counseling for men's mental health improvement, workshop and counseling for couple and family relation improvement.