> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.whyvalues.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why "Masculine" and "Feminine" Have Nothing to Do with Gender - URL: https://www.whyvalues.com/why-masculine-and-feminine-have-nothing-to-do-with-gender/ - Published: 2026-08-10T02:30:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-05T10:05:44.000Z - Description: One dimension of the framework was historically labelled with gendered words - a historical accident that invited a misreading. Jung described a polarity inside every psyche: the drive to act upon the world and the drive to receive it. A woman can be the most mastery-driven person in the room. - Author: WHY Values Framework - Tags: WHY Values framework Every framework with a "doing versus being" dimension eventually has this conversation, and it might as well happen now, head-on. One of the four measurement dimensions in the WHY Values framework - the drive to be the "doer" upon the environment versus the drive to be open to what "happens" - has historically been labelled with a masculine/feminine vocabulary. The label is inherited from two very different sources, and one of them deserves more respect than the other. The first source is Carl Jung, whose concepts of anima and animus described exactly this polarity: **every psyche contains both the assertive, doing principle and the receptive, opening-to-experience principle**, in a balance unique to the person. Jung's claim was about the structure of a single mind. It was never about what men and women are. The second source is the one that did the damage: the habit, codified in twentieth-century survey research, of naming this dimension with gendered words - and Geert Hofstede's famous critique of exactly that move. When his large-scale international surveys used "masculine" and "feminine" as dimension labels, critics rightly asked what gender had to do with it. The answer, Hofstede came to argue, was: nothing necessary. The dimension measured role preferences and achievement-versus-care orientation across societies; the gendered vocabulary was a historical accident that invited a misreading. A woman can be the most mastery-driven person in any room. A man can be the most receptive. Every reader has met both, usually in the same family. **Hofstede's own conclusion:** the dimension measured achievement-versus-care orientation across societies; **the gendered vocabulary was a historical accident that invited a misreading.** So the framework says plainly what many instruments leave implied: **this dimension has nothing to do with gender, and it never did.** It describes two orientations available to every person, in any combination. The "doing" pole is the drive to act upon the world - to bend it, master it, make it produce. The "happening" pole is the drive to receive it - to let experience arrive, to adapt, to be open to what the moment offers rather than what you impose on it. Neither is a virtue. Neither is a sex. Both live, uneasily or comfortably, in everyone. Why keep a dimension with such a checkered naming history at all? Because the underlying polarity is real and does work no other axis does. It predicts how a person responds to a plan falling apart - **attack or adapt**. It predicts what they think "flow" is: the satisfaction of force applied, or the pleasure of surrender to something unfolding. It even predicts arguments about parenting, careers, and God. Pre-empting the objection is not damage control. It is the framework stating its own epistemology: **a dimension is defined by what it measures, not by what its old name implied. The old names measured prejudice. The dimension measures orientation. Keep the second, retire the first.** The practical payoff of the rename shows up immediately in rooms the old vocabulary made awkward. A leadership team can now discuss "how much of our culture is doing versus happening" without anyone hearing a verdict about gender - and the dimension becomes usable exactly where it is most needed: succession planning, team design, the quiet question of why two equally brilliant leaders would run the same company in opposite directions. Vocabulary was the bottleneck. The polarity was never the problem; the label was. Retire the label, and the conversation that was stuck for decades simply starts. Which is also why the dimension belongs in the assessment rather than the argument. Debates about what the poles "really mean" are vocabulary debates. Scores on the dimension - how a person actually allocates attention between acting on the world and receiving it - are behaviour. One is a worldview. The other is a measurement. **Takeaway:** "Doing" versus "happening" is a polarity in every psyche, not a trait of either sex. The old gendered label was an accident of history - and misreading it cost the field decades. **Enjoyed this?** [Become a FREE Member](https://forms.whybehaviourlab.com/whyvaluesmember?ref=whyvalues.com) to read the next one. [See Membership Benefits](https://www.whyvalues.com/explore/member-benefits/). Retire the label. Keep the polarity.