Sex Domination of Occupations and the Tendencies to Approach and Avoid Success and Failure

To test a theory that approach and avoidance imagery would be associated with both success and failure, female and male college students wrote stories to sentence cues. The sentence cues described a female or male stimulus person as succeeding or failing in one of six occupations. Two of the occupations were dominated by females, two by males, and two were approximately equal in sex domination. The imagery content of the stories yielded independent evidence of success-approach, success-avoidance, failure-approach, and failure-avoidance imagery. Success-approach and failure-avoidance imagery increased as the current male domination of the occupation increased; failure-approach imagery increased as the current female domination of the occupation increased. Success-approach imagery appeared more often in stories written by female respondents; success-avoidance imagery appeared more often in stories written by male respondents. The results were consistent with an achievement model that provides for approach and avoidance tendencies to success and failure. Differential results for the respondents of the two sexes are theoretically attributable to different weightings of the four motives mediated by the anticipated consequences of success and failure.