Sex and Gender

• What is Gender?

  • Whether a person is psychologically masculine and/or female
  • How they act and what they identify as
• What is sex?

  • whether a person is biologically male or female
  • What sex organs and chromosomes they have
• What does it mean to be androgynous?

  • if someone has a mix of masculine and feminine traits
• Sex role steryotypes?

  • social and cultural expectations of how males and females should behave
  • women are more nurturing than men
  • men are more aggressive
  • men like football, women don't etc.
  • Some sex-role stereotypes are valid. e.g. men are more aggressive than women due to biological differences
  • However many have no bias in biology and are created entirely by culture
• Sex Role stereotypes Evaluation?

  • there's unlikely to be a one-fits-all explanation of gender stereotypes as there are many different types e.g. biological explanations or cultural explanations
  • interactionism - instead of only relying on one explanation e.g biological, social etc, you should adopt an interactionist approach
  • may argue some stereotypes have a biological explanation that's reinforced and amplified by social learning
  • Negative effects: may be harmful to society e.g women may not go into certain roles (construction) or same w men (nursing)
• The Bem sex-role inventory?

  • Androgyny can be measured using the Bem Sex-role inventory
  • Bem (1974) created the Bem sex role inventory to measure a persons masculine and feminine traits
  • Its a self report method that asks ptp to rate themselves on a scale of 1-7 for 60 items (20 masculine, 20 feminine, 20 neutral)
• Bem four broad personality types?

  • Masculine - High masculinity, low femininity
  • Feminine - High femininity, low masculinity
  • Androgynous - High masculinity, High femininity
  • Undifferentiated - Low masculinity, Low femininity

  He argues androgyny is psychologically healthy and advantageous, because it enables the person to adapt and excel in more situations
• Evaluation of Bem Sex-role inventory - strengths?

  • Reliability: Bem re-administered the Bem sex role inventory to a sample of ptp 4 weeks later after they originally completed the test
  • She found the ptp answers were consistent both times - good test-retest reliability
  • Predictive power: some studies (e.g. Flaherty and Dusek (1890) and Lubinski et al(1981) support Bem's Prediction that androgyny is psychologically advantageous
• What was Flaherty and Dusek (1890)?

  • Its support for Bem's idea that Androgyny is advantageous
  • They did an investigation of the relationship between psychological androgyny and components of self concept
• What was Lubinski et al (1981)?

  • it supports Bem's idea that androgyny is advantageous
  • Looks at the relationship between androgyny and subjective indicators of emotional well being
• Evaluation of BSRI - culture and time?

  • Questions of cultural and temporal validity: The items in the Bem sex role were decided based on surveys of what American students in 1970's considered to be desirable traits for each gender
  • However other cultures might have diff ideas, so the BSRI may not be valid when applied out of America
  • Also, American values may have changed since 1970 so it may lack temporal validity
• Evaluation of BSRI - subjectivity, and simplicity ?

  • Subjective - self report methods such as BSRI are subjective bcs they require ptp to assess their own personality, Each ptp different subjective interpretations, biases, and ways of understanding the items on the list may reduce validity
  • Overly simplistic: focuses solely on personality traits and reduces gender to a single number, could be overly simplistic
  • E.g Golombok and Fivush (1994) argue gender identity also includes things like interests and abilities