A03 Gender Bias

• Implications of gender bias

  Research may create misleading assumptions about female behaviour and fail to challenge negative stereotype and validate disriminatory practices. It may provide a scientific justification to deny women opportunities within wider society.
• Tavris et al (Implications of gender bias)

  States 'it becomes normal for women to feel abnormal' in any domain in which men set the standard of normalcy and thus, this may not just have methodological problems but damaging consequences which affects the lives of real women.
• Sexism within the research process


  Lack of women appointed at senior research level meaning female concerns may not be reflected in the research questions asked. Male researchers more are more likely to publish research when differences are found.
• Lab experiments (Sexism within the research process)

  Female ptps are placed in inequitable research with a (usually) male researcher who has the power to label them unreasonable, irrational and unable to complete complex tasks. This means psychology may be guilty of supporting a form of institutions sexism that creates bias in theory and research.
• Reflexivity


  Many modern researchers are beginning to recognise the effect their own values have on their work. Rather than seeings uch bias as a problem that may threaten research objectivity, they embrace it as a crucial aspect of research.
• Dambrin and Lambert

  include relfection on how their gender-related experiments influence the reading of events in their study in the lack of women in executive positions in accountancy firms. Such research is an important development in psychology.
• Essentialism


  Gender difference in question is inevitable and fixed in nature. Walkerdine reports how in the 1930s, females attending uni would shrivel a female ovaries and harm her chances of birth due to intellectual activity. Such essentialist arguments are politically motivated but disguised as biological facts. Often creates a double-standard in the way the same behaviour is viewed from a male/female perspective.
• Feminist psychology

  Worrel and Remer put forward a number of criteria that should be adhered to in order to avoid gender bias in research. Women should be studied within meaningful and real-life concepts and participate in research rather than be the objects of study. Diversity within groups of women should be examined rather than comparing between men and women. There should also be a greater emphasis placed on collaborative research that prodices qualitative data.