Gender bias:

• Alpha bias

  • Psychological research that exaggerates differences is alpha-biased
  • Such differences are typically presented as fixed and inevitable
  • Differences heighten the value of women but more often they devalue women in relation to men
• Alpha bias


  • IE Freud's theory of psychosexual development
  • Phallic stage of development both boys and girls develop a desire for their opposite-gender parent
  • In a boy this creates a very strong castration anxiety
  • Anxiety is resolved when the boy identifies with his father
  • Girl's eventual identification with her same-gender parent is weaker, which means her Superego is weaker.
  • Girls are morally inferior to boys
• Alpha bias


  • Alpha bias can sometimes favour women in the psychodynamic approach
  • Chodorow suggested that daughters and mothers have a greater connectedness than sons and mothers because of biological similarities
  • As a result of the child's closeness, women develop better abilities to bond with others and empathise.
• Beta bias


  • Psychological research that ignores or underestimates differences is beta-biased
  • Happens when we assume that research findings apply equally to both men and women even when women have been excluded from the research process
• Beta bias:


  IE: fight or flight response

  • Biological research has generally favoured using male animals because female behaviour is affected by regular hormonal changes due to ovulation
  • Ignores any possible differences
  • Early research into fight or flight did just that - it assumed that both males and females respond to threatening situations with fight or flight
• Beta bias:


  FLIGHT OR FIGHT

  • Taylor et al claimed that this is not true and described the tend and befriend response
  • The 'love' hormone oxytocin is more plentiful in women (but present in smaller quantities in men) and it seems that women respond to stress by increasing oxytocin production
  • Reduces the fight or flight response and enhances a preference for tend and befriend

  This illustrates how research that minimises gender differences may result in a misrepresentation of women's behaviour
• Beta bias:


  Other research has misrepresented men

  • IE research on attachment that assumed emotional care is provided solely by mothers.
  • But research on the role of fathers shows that fathers can supply the emotional care often assumed to be the province of women.
• Androcentrism


  Alpha bias and beta bias are consequences of androcentrism

  • Psychology has presented a male-dominated version of the world.
  • IE: the American Psychological Association published a list of the 100 most influential psychologists of the 20th Century which included only 6 women
  • Suggests that psychology has traditionally been a subject produced by men for men and about men an androcentric perspective
• Androcentrism:


  Women's behaviour if it has been considered has been misunderstood, and at worst, pathologised - taken as a sign of illness.

  • Feminists have objected to the diagnostic category premenstrual syndrome, for example, on the grounds that is medicalises women's emotions, such as anger, by explaining these in hormonal terms.

  Men's anger, in contrast, is often seen as a rational response to external pressures (Brescoll and Uhlmann 2008)