Culture

• Research into culture on gender roles was completed by Margaret Mead who completed an ethnographic study by living with various tribes in New Guinea for 6 months.
• Of some of the tribes she stuidied this is what she found:

  • In the Arapesh tribe she found that both men and women were both feminine, expressive, caring, cooperative and both would 'bear a child''.
  • In the Mundugamor tribe both sexes were masculine, assertive, arrogant, fierce and the babies were put away in dark places.
  • In the Johambuli tribe the gender roles were reversed and females became the tradies and independent while the men sat around gossiping and were incapable of making decisions.
• She stated that there was no direct biological relationship between the sex and gender.

  Mead also underestimated the nature of many gender typical behaviours as expressed innate behaviours are the result of cultural norms.
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  Issues with this research is that it may lack internal validity.

  This is because Mead became involved with the tribes for 6 months, living how they lived for this amount of time.

  Because of this, her presence may have caused an impact on thhe behaviour shown and may have perhaps been the result of demman characteristics.

  Therefore it is difficult to say whether Mead's conclusions are accurate or not and therefore her research may lack internal validity.
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  Another issue is that her research may have included observer bias.

  Mead was involved in her research and because of this she may have exaggerated the differences that she observed and the characteristics of the male or female groups.

  Also, Mead found that all the males were aggressive but did not report on this in her findings which shows levels of bias in her research.

  Therefore her research may lack validity because of bias.
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  Mead's research was based on her beliefs of masculine and feminine behaviour and despite trying to conduct an imposed emic (studying the culture from inside the culture and applying the results to that culture), she ended up generalising her beliefs to the research.

  For example she stated the Arapesh tribes had 'masculine tendencies' but who's to say those 'masculine' tendencies aren't joint tendencies in their tribe and culture and her view of masculine is strictly a western view.

  Therefore her research unfortunately has culture bias.
• Buss also investigated culture on gender, but unlike Mead he investigated cultural similarities.

  He did this by doing a survey on 37 countries investigating mate preference.

  He found that women rated males for financial prospects, industriousness and dependability.

  He found that males wanted someone attractive who had the ability to nurture and raise a child.

  This supports the idea of cross cultural similarities in gender roles and that men and women instinctively seek universal features.