Gender: sex-role and stereotypes and androgyny Flashcards
What’s sex?
Biologically male or female
What’s gender?
A person’s sense of maleness or femaleness, a social construct.
What’s androgyny?
Having a balanced combination of masculine and feminine characteristics.
What are sex roles?
The particular behaviours expected of men and women.
What are sex role stereotypes?
Ideas about sex-roles are widely held but tend to be narrow, inflexible and over-generalised.
What’s Bem’s self-report questionnaire known as?
The Bem sex role inventory (BSRI)
How was Bem’s sex role inventory (BSRI) developed?
Asked 50 male and 50 female students to rate themselves on each trait using a 7-point Likert scale where 1 means never or almost never true and 7 means almost always true.
There were 20 feminine words, 20 masculine words and 20 neutral. The scores for masculine and feminine traits were calculated to provide a score for femininity, masculinity and androgyny.
What is the Bem sex role inventory used for?
To measure the mix of an individual’s stereotypically masculine and feminine traits.
What study suggests that environmental factors cause psychological androgyny?
Weisner and Wilson-Mitchell
compared children raised in families that put emphasis on traditional gender roles with children raised in families that downplayed them.
Androgyny was higher in the children encouraged to ignore gender roles.
What does BSRI do?
Measure androgyny
What are the advantages of BSRI?
It has a high test-retest reliability as the Research Ppts give the same answers each time.
What are the disadvantages of BSRI?
It is a reductionist theory, as it reduces femininity and masculinity to a single score.
It is also based on outdated views. Its validity depends on how accurately Research Pptss rate themselves.
AO3 BSRI
+RLA
+Reliability
+Support for research between androgyny and psychological health
-Parental influence
(+AO3) RLA
If androgyny is better for physical and psychological health then the obvious application is to encourage parents to raise children free to assume characteristics of either gender and free of sex-role stereotypes.
There are few individual cases of parents who have done this. One British couple raised their son in a gender-neutral way. The child knew he was a boy because of biological factors but in every other way, he did not identify with either gender. There was a storm of protests who felt it was child abuse. This reveals how strongly feel about sex role stereotypes.
(+AO3) Why does BSRI have high reliability?
Research has high test-retest for the BSRI over a 4-week period; correlations range from .76 to .94. (Bem).
A short form of the scale has been developed using just 30 items and has a good correlation of 90 with the original. Having a shorter form improved the internal reliability of the test because the less socially desirable items were removed, such as ‘gullible’ and ‘childlike’.
