Gender Development 1: gender diffs/ theoretical approaches Flashcards
Modal Gender Development
“Developmental science has long characterized gender in childhood, but this characterization has not applied to all children. Since the 1950s, researchers in mainstream developmental science have painted a detailed portrait of the experiences of one particular variety of child: one who shows the modal—that is, statistically most common—pattern of gender development. For this kind of child, research has shown that their gender largely aligns with their assigned sex.’
Most research is done on children who have been aligned with their gender at birth
Gender Differences: Overview
- what do significant differences not tell you about
- cohen’s d
Significant differences don’t tell you about the size of the difference
Tells you how distributions vary with effect size
Cohen’s d: 0.80
The two variables are symmetrical
There is a large amount of overlap between these distributions
0.2- small effect size
0.5- moderate effect size
0.8- large effect size
Gender Differences: Overview
What did Janet Hyde (2005) propose
- Janet Hyde (2005) proposed “the gender similarities hypothesis.”
- Boys and girls are more similar than different.
- Large physical/biological differences such as height, muscle mass, fat %, testosterone.
Gender Differences: Temperament
Activity level: small → medium
Boys are generally recorded as being more active than girls
Gender Differences: Cognitive
- IQ scores
- Verbal skills
- Spatial skills
IQ scores
Practically identical
Verbal skills
Start out large, later in childhood and adolescence (particularly noticeable in reception)
- Reading advantage is small
- Writing advantage is medium
Spatial skills
Boys outperform girls, the difference increasing through childhood (Halpern, 2004)
- Largest effect for mental rotation
Mental rotation task examples:
Look at figure on left and pick which one matches
Figure is a series of blocks connected
Gender Differences: Academic
GCSE results
GCSEs (2016 results): girls tend to outperform boys
71.3% girls at least one “C” vs 62.4% boys
24.1% girls at least one A* or A vs 16.8% boys
Gender Differences: Academic
A-Level choices
Females choices:
1. Psychology (27.7%)
2. Biology (24.1%)
3. History (21.2%)
Males choices:
1. Mathematics (36%)
2. Business (22.6%)
3. Physics (20.6%)
Women are tending to chose english lit and performing arts whereas males tend to chose computer science and physics
Gender Differences: Social
- Self-regulation: moderate to large effects
- Girls are more compliant
- Better able to resist temptation
- Show more empathy and sympathy
Clip from the TV programme, The Secret Life of 5-year-olds:
In this lemonade task, the children are given lemonade to drink that tastes disgusting. The idea is to test their developing empathy. Will the children pretend that it is ok to spare their teacher’s feelings?
First, 3 boys try the lemonade. Not much evidence of empathy – they tell Kate (their teacher) that it’s disgusting! Next, 3 girls try the lemonade. They are far more diplomatic, in an effort to spare Kate’s feelings. The clip demonstrates the differences between boys and girls in terms of empathy development.
The girls will say more positive comments compared to the boys
Gender Differences: Aggression
What is the difference between direct and indirect aggression and what is found between girls and boys for these?
Direct – physical or verbal acts designed to harm.
Indirect – social exclusion and gossip designed to damage social relationships.
Direct- there is no difference between girls and boys in early childhood but the difference widens with age
There isn’t a difference between angry girls and boy toddlers
Girls show a much steeper decrease in aggression compared to boys
Differences are to do with the way aggression is expressed as well as the amount
Biological Influences: Evolutionary Approaches (e.g., Buss, 1999)
1- what has evolved and what does it offer?
2- what do girls concentrate on?
3- what are boys?
1- Behavioural tendencies have evolved that offer reproductive advantage.
2- Girls concentrate on fostering close relationships, avoiding conflict, and controlling their impulses.
3- Boys are more physically active and aggressive.
What did the research article on ‘the theory that men evolved to hunt and women evolved to gather is wrong’ find?
This paper recently looked at whether it is the case that women are caring and it found this wasn’t the case that there are distinct roles in gender represented societies.
Biological Influences: Hormones
- what was found with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia?
- exposure to testosterone?
Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH): prenatal exposure to excess androgens lead XX (female) children to play in more “masculine” ways
Due to being exposed to testosterone in womb, they are more likely to play in masculine ways
Biological Influences: Behavioural Genetic approach (Iervolino et al, 2005)
Method
- Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), sampled all twins born in England and Wales in 1994-1996.
- Parents asked about their children’s sex-types behaviour at ages 3 & 4
— Toys (e.g., guns, jewellery, dolls)
— Activities (e.g., playing house, soldier, dressing up)
— Characteristics (e.g., enjoys rough-and-tumble play, likes pretty things)
(These items are chosen because they are stereotypical)
