A survey of 240 Japanese university sport science majors has found that students with androgynous gender-role identities—those who score high on both masculine and feminine traits—report the highest levels of body appreciation, while those classified as undifferentiated report the lowest. The study, published in BioPsychoSocial Medicine, also found that female athletes who played team sports reported markedly lower body appreciation than female peers in individual or hybrid sports, a pattern that did not appear among male participants. National-level medalists reported higher body appreciation than non-competitive peers, but competitive level did not change how gender-role traits related to body image.
The researchers, led by Wenjing Cheng with colleagues at Japanese institutions, administered the Japanese-adapted Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the Japanese version of the Body Appreciation Scale-2 (BAS-2) online between October and December 2024. The sample comprised 170 male and 70 female undergraduates aged 16 to 22, with a mean age of 19.12 years, drawn from three universities representing northern, central, and southern regions of Japan. After validation checks in January 2025, 26 cases with extreme outliers were excluded, and the final qualified sample contained no missing data because all questionnaire items were mandatory.
All participants had extensive prior involvement in organised sports through Japan’s extracurricular club system, known as bukatsudo in middle and high school and as taiikukai or circles at university. Nearly all—230 of 240—had trained during elementary school, 231 during middle school, 235 during high school, and 183 at university level. Some 90.4 percent had formal competitive experience ranging from prefectural to national competitions, and participants reported involvement in 32 different sports, from soccer, baseball, sprinting, basketball, and volleyball to the traditional Japanese disciplines of Judo and Kendo. Each participant’s primary sport was determined by their highest competitive level or longest cumulative participation within a single discipline.
Gender-role identity was classified using median splits on the masculinity and femininity subscales of the BSRI, producing four categories: androgynous (high on both), masculine-typed, feminine-typed, and undifferentiated (low on both). The scale showed high internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha of 0.90 for masculinity and 0.81 for femininity. Body appreciation was measured with the 10-item BAS-2, scored from 10 to 50, which assesses positive body image including respect for and valuation of one’s body despite imperfections; its alpha in this study was 0.91. Analyses in SPSS 28.0 included a two-way analysis of variance crossing sex with gender role, one-way ANOVAs by sport type and competitive level, and hierarchical regression models with interaction terms.
The central result was a large main effect of gender role on body appreciation: F(3, 232) = 21.35, p < .001, with an eta-squared of about 0.22. Androgynous students averaged 41.23 on the BAS-2 (SD 6.67), significantly higher than every other group, with all post-hoc comparisons at p ≤ 0.002. The feminine and masculine groups scored similarly to each other, and both scored higher than the undifferentiated group, though the masculine-versus-undifferentiated difference was only marginal (p = .054). There was also a significant main effect of sex, with men reporting higher body appreciation than women across all gender-role categories, and no significant sex-by-gender-role interaction, suggesting the androgyny advantage operated similarly for both sexes in this sample.
Sport type told a more differentiated story. Among female participants, a one-way ANOVA revealed a significant effect of sport type on body appreciation, F(2, 67) = 4.52, p = .014, eta-squared of 0.12. Female team-sport athletes averaged 29.46 (SD 9.57), significantly lower than female individual-sport athletes at 36.17 (SD 9.01, p = .018, d = 0.73) and lower than hybrid-sport athletes—those in sports playable individually or in doubles or teams, such as tennis and badminton—at 37.00 (SD 9.51, p = .014, d = 0.82). A significant sex-by-sport-type interaction confirmed that the effect of sport structure depended on gender. Among male participants, sport type made no meaningful difference.
The authors interpret this pattern through Japan’s gendered sports culture. The female team-sport participants in the sample played sports such as basketball, baseball, soccer, handball, and volleyball, which prior classification research codes as masculine. The paper argues that female athletes in these disciplines must develop strength and muscularity for performance while Japanese feminine ideals—shaped by concepts such as kawaii, emphasising cuteness, slenderness, and delicacy—continue to press in the opposite direction. The collectivist structure of Japanese team sports, with its emphasis on coordination, discipline, and group conformity within the bukatsudo tradition, may further intensify peer comparison and body awareness, the authors suggest, although they note such environments can also foster social support.
Competitive level showed a more selective association. One-way ANOVAs by gender found a significant effect only for female participants, F(4, 65) = 6.65, p < .001, eta-squared of 0.29. Female national medalists averaged 41.81 (SD 6.73), significantly higher than national competitors (33.87), regional competitors (30.36), and prefectural-level competitors (25.30). Male participants showed no significant differences across competitive levels. In the hierarchical regression models, which controlled for biological sex and BMI and dummy-coded competitive levels against non-competitive athletes, national medalists showed consistently higher body appreciation regardless of their femininity level (beta = 0.28, p < .01). Interaction terms between gender traits and competitive level contributed minimally to the models, indicating that competitive level did not substantially moderate the relationship between gender-role traits and body appreciation.
The regression results also carried caveats the authors acknowledge. Masculinity traits initially showed a robust positive association with body appreciation (beta = 0.43, p < .001), but this became non-significant once interaction terms were introduced, likely due to multicollinearity, with variance inflation factors exceeding 10. The masculinity model accounted for 26 percent of variance in body appreciation and the femininity model 30 percent, but interaction terms added only about one percent in each. A marginally significant interaction between femininity and national participation (beta = 0.18, p = .07) was flagged as a potential amplification effect warranting investigation with larger samples. BMI showed no significant association with body appreciation in any model.
The study’s limitations frame how far these findings travel. Sport gender-typing served as a theoretical interpretive framework rather than a formal statistical variable, and the gender connotations of sports may shift across cultural and historical contexts. The BSRI, originally developed in 1974, may not fully reflect contemporary understandings of gender, and the study did not assess media exposure. The analysis focused only on each participant’s primary sport, leaving multi-sport participation unexamined, and some subgroups, particularly hybrid-sport athletes, were small, potentially limiting statistical power. Within those bounds, the findings point to gender-role flexibility as a psychological resource in strongly gender-normed sports settings, and to female team-sport athletes as a group whose body-image experiences deserve targeted attention.
Subject of Research: Cross-sectional study of gender-role identity, sport type, and competitive level as predictors of body appreciation among Japanese university sport science students
Article Title: Androgynous identity predicts body appreciation in Japanese sport science majors: examining the roles of sport type and competitive level
Article References: Cheng, W., Kawanishi, M., Mori, K., Yamada, R., & Seki, T. (2026). Androgynous identity predicts body appreciation in Japanese sport science majors: examining the roles of sport type and competitive level. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 20(1), Article 19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-026-00365-z
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s13030-026-00365-z
Keywords: body appreciation, androgyny, gender roles, Japanese athletes, team sports, sport science students, Bem Sex-Role Inventory, Body Appreciation Scale-2, competitive level, female athletes, bukatsudo, cross-sectional survey
News Source: Glenn Wilkins. (October 29, 2026). Androgynous identity linked to higher body appreciation among Japanese sport science students. Scienmag.
