Sex and gender

• What is sex?

  the concept of male and female based on biology and anatomy.
• What is gender?

  a social concept of male and female based appearance, behaviour and psychological traits.
• What is gender identity?

  someone's personal, internal, sense of gender.
• What are sex role stereotypes?

  rigid and overly simplified social and cultural expectations of how male and females should behave.

  
  

  E.g. men are more aggressive and sporty, whereas women are more nurturing and child orientated.

  
  

  These sex role stereotypes change over time with society e.g. only men joining the army.
• What is androgyny?

  someone who possesses a mixture of masculine and feminine traits.
• What did Sandra Bem do?

  In 1974 Sandra Bem Asked 100 American students to select characteristics that they believed to be masculine, feminine, or neutral, then produced a self report questionnaire where people would rate the trait on a scale of 1-7 on how much they identified with it. This was then put into a grid to show how masculine/feminine people were and people who were both were classes as androgynous.
• What are the strengths of Bems sex inventory?


  One strength of this study is its high external reliability as it gave consistent results every time it was repeated. Bem showed this through the test retest method, asking the same group of participants to repeat the test 4 weeks later. Furthermore, it has high internal reliability, as Bem split the test into two half's and asked the group of participants to complete it, finding that the results from the separate half's were similar. Finally, the 100 students used by Bem to create the BSRI were evenly split into male and female, and only traits chosen by both men and women were used, meaning that the questionnaire is unlikely to have any gender bias.
• What are the weaknesses of Bems sex inventory?

  this study has been criticised for potentially lacking temporal validity as the characteristics were chosen in the 1970s, and we know that sex role stereotypes change over time. Additionally, the 1-7 scale is subjective so it may lack internal validity, questioning wether the results of the study can be used at all.