Haisoniuk N. Gender peculiarities of students’ personal self-presentaion

The comparative analysis of the theoretical approaches to self-presentation studies is the basis for defining self-presentation as a relation between personal features, which define the subject’s role repertoire. The structure of youth self-presentation should be studied on the basis of interpreting self-presentation as a generalized concept combining one’s role repertoire, gender identity, I-concept and other personality features, which result in effective demonstration of the personally relevant information. Defining self-presentation as an instrument for reflecting psychological features and one’s role repertoire enabled us to define structural elements of the self-presentation theoretic model. The designed six-element model of self-presentation contains information metabolism type, actual capacities, personal dispositions, time competence, locus of control and interpersonal orientation. The designed model enabled further analysis for gender differences in self-presentations of students with different cultural backgrounds. Empirical study based on binary gender model enabled the highlight of the tendencies for gender differences observed in students’ self-presentation structures. Thus, male self-presentation structure can be described in terms of their orientation to achieve personal fulfillment through their belonging to the reference group and being involved into social-psychological interactions on different levels. While self-presentation of the female respondents is more ego-oriented and concentrated on personal realization and social environmental factors are merely instruments. These peculiarities of the self-presentation structural models derived from the changes in social-psychological context were the grounds to choose the gender schema theory as a prospective approach to study the changes in gender conditioned behavior in general, and students’ gender self-presentation in particular. The analysis of the empirical data, based on the gender schemes theory, clarified the fact that self-presentation is conditioned by social-psychological context. Besides, applying gender schemes theory enabled us to define the role of the socio-cultural factors in self-presentation forming. Assuming that self-presentational process penetrates all the span of interpersonal relations it is strongly influenced by such socio-cultural agents as ethnicity, religious identity and professional training. We chose the role of ethnic and professional training as the objectives for our study. It is stated that apprehended choice of one’s future profession is often conditioned by the prevalence of some personal dispositions and features of the information metabolism type, and thus it is an important factor for forming one’s self-presentation during their enrollment in higher educational institutions. While one’s ethnicity defines the span of socially appropriate peculiarities of the gender conditioned behavior, but unlike one’s religious identity allows to divide the respondents into more numerous groups. Professional peculiarities of the self-presentation compared to ethnic have more significant differences by gender. Respondents from social careers showed more significant gender conditioned differences, being compared to the results of those from technical careers group. But both professional groups are characterized by the absence of significant differences in those elements of self-presentation, which are essential for professional becoming. It can be stated that respondents with androgynous behavioral peculiarities possess more effective professional self-presentation. Ukrainian students can be characterized by more essential gender conditioned differences compared to students of African and Indian origin. Gender differences in demonstrations of the primary (affective-based) actual capacities are essential for Ukrainian students, while they are not peculiar for African students. Comparison of the gender conditioned differences in the demonstrations of the secondary (cognitive-based) actual capacities showed that their features are quite common for students of Ukrainian and African origin. For Ukrainian students the gender differences by personal traits of self-control and agreeableness are those most essential. While for Indian students most essential difference are traced in open-mindedness trait and for African students it’s self-control (conscientiousness) trait. The gender differences in interpersonal orientations characterize Ukrainian students only. Compared to Indian and Ukrainian students, African students are characterized by more internal locus of control. And the tendency to use their time in a rational way is a common trait for feminine respondents of all ethnic groups in our study.