American men tend to score slightly higher on measures of self-esteem than American women. We ask whether this is because of gender differences in responsiveness to the positive and negative phrasing of self-related survey statements used to assess self-esteem. We argue that self-enhancing and self-derogatory tendencies can be inferred from wording valence effects that are common to both self-esteem and optimism. Including latent factors for those response tendencies in a bifactor measurement model transforms the latent factors for self-esteem and optimism into “unvarnished” forms of self-evaluation and future orientation. The bifactor model is shown to fit data from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (MIDUS) better than a conventional measurement model. Although we observe a gender difference in self-esteem, as identified in the conventional model, no gender difference is observed in unvarnished self-evaluation identified in the bifactor model. Our results are consistent with the idea that self-esteem differs by gender due to a greater tendency for men to agree with positively worded self-statements, and a greater tendency for women to agree with negatively worded selfstatements. We argue that those tendencies can be interpreted respectively as reflecting unconscious dispositions to self-enhance and self-derogate.

Introduction

Many studies have observed a gender difference in self-esteem (Feingold, 1994; Kling, Hyde, Showers, & Buswell, 1999; Major, Barr, Zubek, & Babey, 1999; Orth, Trzesniewski, & Robins, 2010; Rentzsch, Wenzler, & Schütz, 2016; Robins, Trzesniewski, Tracy, Gosling, & Potter, 2002), with males typically reporting slightly higher levels of self-esteem than females. Some research has investigated this gender difference by decomposing self-esteem into multiple dimensions or domains. For example, Rentzsch et al. (2016) studied gender differences in esteem related academic performance and physical appearance. Other studies have investigated whether gender differences in the effects of positively- and negatively-valenced wording of survey items contribute to the gender difference in global self-esteem scores (Michaelides et al., 2016; Salerno, Ingoglia, & Coco, 2017).1 We build on the latter approach by decomposing self-esteem and optimism scores into sub-dimensions comprised of positive and negative wording valence effects, as well as a sub-dimension that is independent of those effects. We conceptualize positive and negative wording valence effects as respectively reflecting subtle unconscious dispositions to self-enhance and self-derogate. Taken together those dispositions can be interpreted as “varnishing” more conscious forms of self-evaluation, and evaluation of one’s future.