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)
Biological Influences: Behavioural Genetic approach (Iervolino et al, 2005)
Results
Boys are generally scoring higher in this measure in sex type behaviour and this is happening across twins and siblings.
They looked at correlations- if you have a pair of twins how similar is twin A’s behaviour to twin B’s
Correlations 0 (unable to guess twin score) 1 (know twin score)
- Identical twins have a high correlation
- Theres still some relationship with non-identical twins
- Theres much less of a relationship with siblings
- higher scores for boys compared to girls
Difference in amount of boys and girls’ behaviours that is determined by:
heritability, shared environment, twin-specific environment, non-shared environment
Heritability (genetic factor) shows a large proportion of behaviours that girls show but less of girls behaviour is determined by environmental factors
Boys show some behaviour is determined by heritability but also by environmental
Shared environment is important for boys but not for girls
Girls and boys show a similar amount of twin-specific environment
Socialisation theories:
Social learning theory (Mischel,1966)
- why do children learn gender roles
- child is _____
- key processes?
Children learn gender roles because social agents teach them (e.g., parents, teachers, peers)
Child is passive
Key processes are:
(a) Reinforcement: e.g., Langlois & Downs (1980) – fathers more positive to same-sex behaviour, and critical of other-sex behaviour in pre-school children
(b) Modelling: BUT children’s gender-role behaviour is not strongly correlated with their parents’ behaviour (Huston, 1983)
Socialisation theories:
Social cognitive theory (Bussey & Bandura, 1999)
- more recently, what factors are incorporated
- three key influences?
- what as a socio-cognitive regulator
More recently, both social AND cognitive factors incorporated
Three key influences:
(1) Modelling in immediate environment
(2) Enactive experience- if see a boy playing football and crying, you will use this…?
(3) Direct tuition
Importance of children’s outcome expectancies as a socio-cognitive regulator
Socialisations theories: Problems
- Adevelopmental: doesn’t account for developmental changes in children’s gender-stereotyped beliefs
- Major mechanisms of the theory (parental reinforcement and modelling) haven’t been supported consistently by research
- BUT, it does acknowledge the role of the social environment
Cognitive theories:
Cognitive developmental theory (Kohlberg, 1966)
- what theories?
- what does understanding of gender develop with?
- BUT
Active- construct theories
Understanding of gender develops within a framework of general cognitive development and initiates gender development
BUT, children prefer same-sex toys before they have a full understand of gender (Weinraub et al, 1984)
Stages of Gender Understanding (Slaby & Frey, 1976)
(1) Gender identity: ability to label each gender by 2½ years
(2) Gender stability: understand sex is stable over time by 3½ years
(3) Gender constancy: understand permanence of sex by 6 years.
Cognitive theories: Gender schema theory (e.g., Martin & Halverson, 1981)
- what has a more central role?
- what guides gender-stereotyped processing and behaviour
- stereotype?
- Gender identity has central role rather than gender constancy
- Networks of gender-related information guide gender-stereotyped processing and behaviour
- Have an idea that most surgeons are men and then incorporate this into your representation
Gender Schema:
- develop _______ before _______?
- BUT?
- Develop own-sex schema before other-sex schema
- But, there are no differences in boys’ and girls’ knowledge of gender-stereotypes so this theory does not explain the asymmetry in boys’ and girls’ gender-typed preferences
Cognitive theories: Problems
☹️ Cognitive theories don’t address why males and females are valued differentially
☹️These theories largely ignore the social context within which gender development occurs
☹️The predicted relationship between gender-stereotypes and gender-typed behaviour is typically not found e.g., Perry, White, & Perry (1984): gender-stereotyped toy preferences were found 6 months before children showed much knowledge of gender-stereotypes
