Sex and gender & Androgyny

Biological sex

Whether someone is male or female dependent on their biological anatomy

Gender

Either based on:

1. Behaviour

2. Psychological traits

3. Appearance

Gender identity

Someone’s personal internal sense of gender

Gender dysphoria

A sense of unease due to a mismatch in someone’s biological sex and their gender identity

Sex role stereotypes

Societies beliefs about types of sex roles that are oversimplified to create ignorant assumptions

Androgyny

Having high levels of both male and female personality traits

Bem sex role inventory

A graph that plots data corresponding to peoples answers from a questionnaire that shows the type of personality trait someone has

BSRI method

1. Got 100 participants (50 male and 50 female)

2. Half the participants were asked to choose male traits and vice versa

3. Bem chose 20 male, female and both traits for a questionnaire

4. Got people to fill out ranking themselves out of 7 for all questions

5. Show scores of traits and plot them

Aim of Bem’s study

To see how much people conform to sex role stereotypes and how androgynous people are

Strengths of BSRI

1. Consistent results that are trustworthy- Bem ran the experiment again 4 weeks later and found consistent results from using test-retest

2. Low gender bias- Bem used an equal number of male and female participants showing no bias towards a certain gender

Weaknesses of BSRI

1. Temporal validity- sex roles stereotypes change overtime and do not stay the same.

2. Might not actually measure Androgyny- it just shows people who give themselves high scores

Flaherty and Dusek

Conducted a study that proved androgynous people had better psychological health