A03 Gender Bias: Gender & Culture in Psychology

• Evaluation


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• Misleading Assumptions (B)

  • Gender bias research can create misleading assumptions about female behaviour and fail to challenge -ve stereotypes.
  • For example, he statistic that women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with depression as men may be slowed by hormonal fluctuations which affect mood.
  • This statistic may lead doctors (mostly men) to give diagnoses fulfilling the (incorrect) expectation that women are more at risk of depression.
  • Such research provides scientific justification to deny women opportunities within the workplace or wider society.
• Not many senior, female psychologists (B):

  • At senior research level women are in minority so their concerns may not be reflected in the research questions asked.
  • Male researchers are more likely to have their work published and studies that find significant gender differences are more likely to be published then those that do not.
  • Also, lab experiments may disadvantage women as female ppts are usually paired with a male researcher who has the power to label them unreasonable or irrational.
  • Therefore, psychology may be guilty of institutional sexism that creates bias in the theory or research.
• Double Standards (B):

  • Essentialists psychology suggests that gender differences reported by psychologists are inevitable and 'fixed' in nature.
  • In the 1930s, 'scientific' research revealed how intellectual activity like attending university would shrivel a women's ovaries and harm her chances of giving birth (Walkerdine 1990).
  • Such essentialist accounts in psychology are often politically motivated arguments disguised as biological 'facts'.
  • This often creates 'double standards' in the way that the same behaviour is viewed from a different male and female perspective.
• Qualitative Data Collection (B):

  • There are ways to reduce this gender bias which appears in much psychological research.
  • Feminist Worrell (1992) suggested more qualitative methods should be used to measure female behaviour like meaningful real life contexts.
  • She also suggested that diversity within groups of women should be studied more instead of looking at the comparisons between women and men. (We should reduce constant comparison with men)
  • In conclusion, methods which use qualitative data collection are much more beneficial in understanding gender differences rather than quantitative.