Gender Bias

• Universality - Any underlying characteristics of human beings that is capable of being applied to all, despite differences of experience and upbringing.
• Gender Bias - Psychological research or theory that offers a view that does not justifiably represent that experience and behaviours of men or women.
• Androcentrism - Male centred; when 'normal' behaviour is judged according to a male standard (meaning that by comparison female behaviour is abnormal or deficient
• The term bias is used to suggest that a person's views are distorted or unfair in some way.
• When a theory is described as universal, it means that it can apply to all people, irrespective of gender or culture.
• Androcentrism leads to female behaviour being misunderstood and pathologized

  • Taken as a psychological instability or disorder.
  • Feminist commentators have been objected to the diagnostic category PMS on the grounds of stereotypes and trivialises female experience.
• Brescoll and Uhlman claim PMS is a social construct which medicalises female emotion, especially anger explaining it in hormonal terms.
• Hare-Mustin and Marecek argued for there being two types of gender bias: Alpha and Beta bias.
• Alpha bias is when the differences between men and women are greatly exaggerated in psychological research
• A classic example of Alpha Bias is The Psychosexual Stages of development.

  • Boys feel castration anxiety - become closer to fathers quicker.
  • Girls have penis envy - replaced with baby need - a lot longer to identify with mother causing superego to develop later so they have looser morals than men.

  Freud even suggested that "femininity is failed masculinity" despite most of his patients being female.
• Am example of alpha bias is that "boys will be boys".

  • Sociobiological theory of relationships suggest that male infidelity is inevitable and female maternity is inevitable due to biological needs.
  • Acting outside their genetic makeup becomes abnormal behaviour.
• Beta bias ignores the difference between men and women
• An example of beta bias is the 'fight or flight' response.

  • Research focuses on male animals due to their hormone levels being easier to measure.
  • Psychologists have investigated whether there is a difference between men and women's response to stress.
  • Taylor et al (2005) found that women adopt a 'tend and befriend' response to stressful situations.
• Estrocentrism is where female behaviour is seen as the norm.
• Freud's theories usually described male behavior as the norm, explaing female behaviour as anything which differed from the norm. For example, Freud proposed that when girls find out that they don't have a penis, they suffer from penis envy.
• Asch's theory into conformity was androcentric - he used a male-only sample, meaning that his results couldn't be generralised to women.
• Evaluation Gender Bias - Stereotypes

  • Darwin's established theory of sexual selection suggests women are selective in terms of male selection.
  • This theory has gone unchallenged, but recent DNA evidence suggests women are equally as competitive as men.

  This highlights the importance to challenging earlier gender research to ensure we don't rely on stereotypes.
• Evaluation Gender Bias - Empower Women

  • More contemporary psychologists have looked for ways to reduce gender bias, this could be done by producing theories thet empower women.
  • Cornwell et al noted that females are better at learning as they are more attentive and organised, thus emphasising both the value and positive attributes of women.
• Evaluation Gender Bias - Feminist Psychology

  • Feminists accept that there are biological difference between males and females, by social stereotypes can be far more damning. In order to restore imbalance in reseach we could highlight evidence that women may be inferior.
  • Research by Eagly claimed that female are less effective leaders than males - highlights the lack of support available for women this led to producing training programs.
• Evaluation Gender bias - Avoid Beta Bias

  • When minimising the difference between men and women the results can be mixed.
  • Equal treatment under the law has allowed women greater access to educational and occupational opportunities, however this can draw attention away from women's special needs.
  • For example equal parental leave to men and women ignore the biological demands of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.