Gender differences in narcissism

Historically, narcissism was defined by Paul Nacke to describe a current client with an autoerotic pervasion for himself. Later in time, Freud believed women to be narcissistic in result to their physical appearance. Social role theory states that women are less domestic than in the past. An increase of narcissistic behavior was explained by consequence to less focus on the home.

In gender studies, the analysis of gender differences in narcissism shows that male narcissism and female narcissism differ in a number of aspects. In terms of content validity, narcissism has many subcategories that function to construct the overall idea. For example, there is the distinction between public and private narcissism. Public narcissism is defined as interest in others' judgements upon oneself. Private narcissism is focused on personal thoughts about oneself. Study findings support that females are more likely to engage in public and private narcissism than males.

Gender differences of narcissism include the ability to feel shame. Within the sample men who were classified as low-level narcissists, there are moderate amounts of shame. Contrary to this focal group, the sample women had slightly more shame than low-level narcissistic men. According to Kernberg's theory, high narcissistic levels represent inability to suppress one's archaic ego. Kernberg states that narcissists "tend not to readily experience affects such as depression and shame".  His idea of the structure differs from Nacke and Freud, because it is based mainly on humility rather than vanity (central point of previous studies mentioned).

Similarly, it has been reported that narcissism and guilt are positively correlated when studying men. However, for women, there is no correlation between narcissism and guilt.

Jeffrey Kluger, in his 2014 book The Narcissist Next Door suggested that our society, still largely patriarchal, is more likely to tolerate male narcissism and aggressiveness than female narcissism and aggression. This assertion was voiced, although without definite proof, by a number of other researchers.

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