Issues and Debates: Gender Bias

• Gender Bias


  Favouring one gender over the other
• Psychologists seek universality


  Bias may be inevitable
• Universality


  Conclusions drawn are applied to everyone, regardless of time or culture
• Culture and gender bias

  Threaten the universality of findings in psychology
• Alpha Bias


  Refers to theories which exaggerate the difference between men and women
• Alpha Bias example


  • Freud's theory of psychosexual development
  • Boys develop castration anxiety, girls have weaker superego so are morally inferior
• Beta Bias


  Refers to theories which ignore or minimise the differences between men and women and focuses on similarities
• Beta Bias example


  • Fight or flight response research assumes male and female behaviour is the same
  • Biological research favours male animals as female behaviour is affected by hormones
• Androcentrism


  Theories focused or centred on males, normal behaviour judged according to male standard
• Androcentrism example


  • Asch's conformity study used only male participants but assumed results applied to women
• Gender bias may create misleading assumptions about female behaviour and fail to challenge negative stereotypes
• Gender bias promotes sexism in the research process, with women underrepresented in research fields
• Research methodology used in gender research is biased, leading to differences between males and females