Sex and Gender: Gender Flashcards
What is sex?
Whether you’re biologically male or female.
What is gender?
A person’s sense of maleness or femaleness, a social construct.
What is 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 was Bem’s self-report questionnaire known as?
How was the Bem sex role inventory developed?
What is the Bem sex role inventory used for?
The Bem sex role inventory.
She 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.
To measure the mix of an individual’s stereotypically masculine and feminine traits.
Give a study that suggests 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 are the advantages of the bsri?
What are the disadvantages of the bsri?
+ It has a high test-retest reliability as the RPs give the same answers each time.
- 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- It is also based on outdated views.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 RPs rate themselves.
A03: BSRIs
+ RLA
+ Reliability
- Parental influence
+ Support for the relationship between androgyny and psychological health
A03: BSRIs - 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.
A03: BSRIs - 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’.
A03: BSRIs - Parental influence
Smith and Lloyd (1978) showed that mothers do treat boy and girl babies differently. 2 mothers filmed for 10 mins playing with a 6-month-old baby. Two were actually boys, and two were girls but the clothes, and names were not always consistent with sex. seven toys were present. 2 feminine, 2 masculine, and 3 neutral. If the mother thought she was playing with a boy, she would verbally encourage motor activity and offered gender-appropriate toys. Mothers offered gendered toys to perceived gendered babies - typical gender expectations
> Suggests parental behaviour can impact the learning of SRSs
A03: BSRIs - Support for the relationship between androgyny and psychological health
The research found a positive correlation between androgyny and psychological health. Supporting evidence for androgyny and psychological health come from Prakash et al who found females with high masculine scores had lower depression, yet females with higher femininity had higher levels of depression etc. This shows there is a correlation between the two factors. This strengthens the argument because it helps psychology become more scientific. It has a psychoprotective effect because those with masculinity and femininity were better off in terms of their health.
