Conscious about male attitude (9)
I believe the answer is:
sentiment
'attitude' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'conscious about male' is the wordplay.
'conscious' becomes 'sentient' ('sentient' can be similar in meaning to 'conscious').
'about' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'male' becomes 'm' (common abbreviation).
'sentient' placed around 'm' is 'SENTIMENT'.
(Other definitions for sentiment that I've seen before include "Mawkishness" , "View, opinion, feeling" , "Tender feeling" , "Test men in, say, emotion" , "Emotional feeling" .)