Topic 3 - Gender Flashcards
What is the difference between sex and gender?
- sex = biological
- gender = socially defined
What are gender roles?
behaviours considered appropriate for males and females
What is gender identity?
perception of oneself as male or female
What does dichotomous mean?
- divided into 2 parts
- sex is not dichotomous its continuous
- 1 in 4 live births show sex chromosome atypicalities
- many mens T levels are indistinguishable from ‘above average’ women
- gender identity is also not dichotomous
- 1.3% of UK population identify as gender variant e.g. trans, non binary
How do we quantify sex differences in social behaviour?
- group distributions always show overlap
- d scores summaries overlap/ difference
- cohens d = male average - female average ÷ pooled standard deviation
- positive value = men are higher
- negative value = women are higher
- Cohen’s guidelines for interpreting effect sizes are that d = 0.20 is a small difference, 0.50 is moderate, and 0.80 is large
How can we measure sex differences?
- experiments:
-> have found that males are more physically aggressive
-> found that females show more positive social behaviour and are more influenced by peer pressure - psychometric tests:
-> pencil and paper tests of beliefs, preferences and behaviours
-> they must be reliable and valid - meta-analysis:
-> combines findings from multiple studies
How can we measure masculinity and femininity?
- Bem sex role inventory (BSRI)
- suggested that masculinity and femininity were 2 separate dimensions
- a list of words were generated and raters were asked to state whether they were more desirable in men or women
What did the BSRI find?
- women score higher than men on the femininity scale
- men score higher than women on the masculinity scale
- but masculinity and femininity are not statistically independent
- some also argue that Bem’s scale measures something other than masculinity/ femininity
Social role theory (Early 1987)?
- alternative to the evolutionary theory
- there is a culturally imposed gendered division of labour -> conformity to gender role expectations + sex-typed skills and beliefs -> sex differences in behaviour
Do stereotypes/ division of labour affect behaviour?
- children show sex differences in behaviour before they have stereotypes
- stereotypes underestimate some differences
What is the learning theory (Mischel 1966)?
- boys and girls are encouraged and rewarded for different behaviours
- but a meta-analysis by Lytton & Romney found no support except forest-typed toys and chores
Social learning theory (Bandura 1973)?
- emphasised the importance of modelling
- imitation is found when model engages in sex typical behaviour
Gender schema theory?
- idea that people attend to gender-typed information as schema develops
- Liben et al found that perceiving self as more sex typed predicts later gender stereotyping in children
What is the role of the media?
- it is a major source of gender information
- children’s characters are mostly male and still gender stereotyped
What is inter-sexual selection?
opposite sex prefers some traits more than others increasing the frequency of those genes in the next generation
What is intra-sexual competition?
some traits make an individual a better competitor against members of their own sex
Parental investment (PI)?
- the sex which has lower PI tends to compete for mating access
- the sex which has the higher PI tends to be ‘choosy’
- in most species this leads to competitive males and choosy females
Female parental investment is greater than male parental investment so…?
- males compete for females
- we see the legacy in men’s greater competitiveness, dominance striving and aggression
- we see the legacy in women’s aversion to physical risk, low aggression and greater use of democratic leadership
Biology and gender?
- selection acts through genes
- sex linked gene = located on the X or Y chromosome
- sex limited gene = located on a different chromosome
-> ‘turned on’ by the presence of sex hormone
-> most sex differences are sex-limited
Testosterone?
- the Batista boys:
-> family with rare genetic disorder
-> 18 ‘boys’ raised as ‘girls’
-> at puberty they all experienced a release of T and grew beards, voices broke etc.
Epigenetics?
- combines social and biological approaches
- looks at genes and environment interaction
- genes create finite no. of options for the environment to ‘choose’/ refine
