Gender and culture

• Gender bias

  when one gender is treated less favourably than the other
• Alpha bias

  • differences between men and women are exagerated
• beta bias

  • differences between men and women are minimised
• Androcentrism

  • taking male thinking as normal and regarding female thinking as abnormal when it differs from the view of a male
• positives of alpha bias

  • healthy criticism of cultural values that praise certain male qualities such as agression
• negatives of alpha bias

  • can sustain prejudices and stereotypes
• positives of beta bias

  • makes people see men and women as the same, leading to equal treatment in legal terms
• negatives of beta bias

  • draws attention away from the differences in power between men and women
• Research linking to gender bias

  • freuds psychosexual development - his theory is androcentric as women are defined psychologically by the fact they are not men.
• Culture bias

  • cultures may differ from one another in many ways
  • one view in one culture may not directly apply to another culture
  • can occur when a researcher assumes that an emic construct is actually etic
• Emic construct

  • one that is applied only to one cultural group
• Etic construct

  • behaviour is universal to all cultures
• Ethnocentrism

  • occurs when a researcher assumes that their own culturally specific practices are natural or right
  • uses their own ethnic group to evaluate and make judgment about other groups
• Cultural relativism

  • principle of regarding beliefs and values of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself
• culturally biased research

  • ainsworth's strange situation is not appropriate for assessing children from non-us populations as it is based on western childrearing ideals as it only used American, middle class, white children and mothers