Gender bias

What is bias?

A distorted view of the world.

What is gender bias?

A distorted view of what behaviours may be for men and women.

What are the two types of bias?

Alpha bias and Beta bias.

What is the difference between them?

Alpha bias - assuming real and enduring differences

Beta bias - minimising/ignoring differences

So what is alpha bias in the gender debate? Give an example.

Exaggerating the differences between men and women, devaluing one gender in comparison to another.

EXAMPLE:

Freud’s view of women as being failed men in his psychoanalysis.

He said in his 1800s theory that women are jealous of men’s penises - “penis envy” - as they can’t undergo the oedipus conflict as boys do - “castration anxiety”.

Freud therefore concluded that women were inferior as they had a weaker identification with their mothers.

What is beta bias in the gender debate? Give an example.

Assuming the same things are true for both men and women, by minimising the differences between the genders.

EXAMPLE:

The fight-or-flight response used only male samples in its research, assuming the results would be universal to both genders. Although Taylor (2000) challenged this by offering the ‘tend and befriend’ response.

What is androcentrism?

A male world-view.

This is as a result of psychology (and society in general) being male-dominated throughout history, with most psychologists being men.

Androcentrism may result in alpha/beta bias.

What is the solution of the gender debate?

Universality - recognising differences in genders but not superiority of one gender over the other.

Gilligan’s 1982 ‘moral reasoning’ research: Showed that women favour care orientation and men favour a justice orientation.

This showed that men and women are different, but neither kind of moral reasoning is ‘better’.

How do you structure an issues and debate evaluation?

Not strengths and weaknesses - by presenting a balanced discussion. There is no ‘right and wrong’ in the debates.

Gender bias eval/discussion.

Feminist psychology (Gilligan) - agrees that there are real biological sex differences, but states that social stereotypes make a far greater contribution to perceived differences. So our ‘facts’ about gender should be revised.

Eg Eagly (1978) acknowledged that women may be less effective leaders than men, but this knowledge should be used to develop suitable training programmes to improve leadership skills of women - this supports women’s inferior traits.

More eval

Gender of the researcher is important - Rosenthal (1996) found that male experimenters are more pleasant, friendly and encouraging towards female participants compared to male participants. This resulted in male participants performing less well on assigned tasks.

Women are superior at some things (Cornwell, 2013) - he found that they are better at learning as they are more attentive and organised.

Conclusion in eval

Old assumptions must be revised - Victorian ideas state they women are sensitive and men are aggressive and competitive. Women are equally competitive and aggressive when the need arises.

The answer to the debate is universality - recognising differences in genders but not the superiority of one gender over another. Men and women are good and bad at different things.