POW Chapter 2: Theoretical Perspectives on Gender

Gender differences have fascinated people:

• science has come to dominate intellectual thoughts & understandings of gender differences have developed

Sigmund Freud - Psychoanalytical theory: a psychological theory whose basic assumption is that part of the human psyche is unconscious

• Erogenous zones: areas of the body that are particularly sensitive to sexual stimulation

• Stage 1 - oral stage; the infant derives pleasure from sucking and eating, experiences through the mouth

• stage 2 - anal stage, pleasure is focused on defecating

• stage 3 - phallic stage, around 3-6 years, when for boys the pleasure zone is the penis and sexual feelings arise toward the mother and, for girls, sexual feelings arise toward the father

  • oedipal complex: a boys attraction and intense love for his mother and his desire to do away with his father

    • The resolution of the Oedipal complex is critical for the boy’s development, being necessary for the formation of his gender identity and superego

  • superego: Freud’s term for the part of the personality containing a person’s conscience

  • Electra complex: a girl’s sexual attraction and intense love for her father

    • Freud theorized the Electra complex is never fully resolved, while the Oedipal complex is fully resolved for boys.

    • Leads the girl to lifelong feelings of inferiority, predisposition to jealousy, and intense maternal desires → because of this her superego is immature and she is morally inferior and lacks a sense of justice, ultimately because she lacks a penis

Problems with this theory: Most of its concepts cannot be evaluated scientifically to see whether they are accurate; unconscious desires cannot be directly observed or measured, so impossible to falsify or evaluate validity.

• Freud derived these ideas almost exclusively from work with patients who sought therapy, so he made an error of overgeneralization.

• His views on the origin of differences between men and women is heavily influenced on biological and mainly anatomical differences.

• His theory is phallocentric; male centered, penis-centric

• articulating age old myths and images about women in scientific language; the image of women as sinful and the source of evil is translated into the scientific-sounding “immature superego”

• Androcentric model - example of male centric and male-as-normative model

• For Freud, a girl is a castrated boy; his model of development describes male development, with female development being an inadequate variation on it.

Modification of Freud’s theory:

• Karen Horney - In 1926 paper, pointed out that Freud’s theory articulates the childish ideas boys have of girls and that it is phallocentric

  • Because of male envy of women, particularly of female reproductive potential, which is called womb envy --

  • Femininity complex - an overcompensation for feelings of anatomical inferiority

• Chodorow - Integrated psychoanalytical and feminist perspectives and answered the question: Why do women mother??

  • Because mothering produces daughters who want to mother, thereby reproducing mothering and sons who dominate and devalue women.

  • Infants have total dependency and needs are satisfied almost exclusively by the mother, so infants are egocentric and have trouble distinguishing between the mother and themselves; infants blissfully assume that mothers have no interests outside of mothering children.

  • This intensely intimate relationship of this nature with the mother causes both boys and girls to continue to expect women to be caring and sacrificing, forever shaping attitudes towards women -- and the girl’s sense of self is profoundly influenced because her relationship to her mother is never entirely broken.

  • So girls continue to define themselves as caregivers of others in accordance to the behaviors of their mother, while boys separate themselves.

  • Masculinity involves denying feminine maternal attachment and involves the boy’s need to separate himself from his mother and virtually all other women, and defining a masculine identity for himself fosters his devaluation of all women

  • Women’s relational needs are greater than men’s relational needs, which are satisfied by a heterosexual relationship with a woman

  • While a woman’s relational needs can not be entirely satisfied by a man, their relational needs are satisfied by having babies, which causes the mothering cycle to continue repeating itself

  • Feminist revision of Freud’s theory: penis envy results not from a girl’s recognition of the superiority of the penis, but rather from the fact that the penis symbolizes the power men have in our society. Further, women’s mothering is being taken for granted and not given the attention it deserves, and the only way for the cycle to be broken is for men to begin equally participating in child care.

• Research conducted to find support for Chodorow’s theory found that mothers behaved similarly with their sons and daughters, and that boys and girls behaved similarly with their mothers. → so not support for the theory

• Key criticisms of Chodorow’s theory: has a heterosexist and cisnormative bias, and makes no attempt to understand the development of people with other sexual orientations

  • lacks an intersectional approach, in that it focuses exclusively on gender and ignores race and social class

  • most of the evidence Chodorow cites in her boo is clinical.

• Social learning theory: it is a major theoretical system in psychology, designed to describe the processes of human development -- emphasizes key mechanisms in development -- including reinforcement, punishment, imitation, and observational learning

• Children learn how to behave differently based on their children, operant conditioning mechanisms of reinforcement and punishment explain the acquisition of gender roles. → Children are rewarded or reinforced for displaying gender-appropriate behaviors and punished or not rewarded for displaying gender-inappropriate behaviors.

• Two mechanisms of social learning - imitation or modeling

  • imitation: people doing what they see others doing

  • modeling: demonstrating gendered behavior for children, also refers to the child’s imitation of the behavior

• Observational learning: observing someone doing something, then doing it at a later time

• Gender typing: the acquisition of gender-typed behaviors and learning of gender roles

  • children tend to imitate models of a similar gender more than they imitate models of different genders, motivated by the power of authority figures so children more likely to imitate parents, and older peers

  • Children may learn behaviors but not perform them, a behavior may become part of the child’s repertoire through observational learning, such info may be stored up for use perhaps years later.

  • Children will also learn to Anticipate the consequences of their actions

• Albert Bandura - bobo doll and social modeling of aggression, adult model performing aggressive behavior but different reactions, one was rewarded, one was punished, and one was left alone

  • modeling aggression increases the drive for aggression

  • children who viewed the model being punished performed the least aggressive behavior

  • boys performed more aggressive behavior than girls, But when the model was rewarded, girls performed nearly as many aggressive behaviors as boys

• Gender development is complex and shaped by many factors

• Toy commercials can also shape gender typing among children.

• Cognitive Social Learning Theory: emphasis on reinforcement, punishment, and imitation. Cognitive processes such as attention, self-regulation, and self-efficacy are added.

• Effect of attention and gender: children tend to pay attention to and thus are more inclined to imitate same-gender models.

• As children develop, regulation of their behavior shifts from externally imposed rewards and punishments to internalized standards and self-sanctions; they guide their own behavior, and as they learn the significance of gender, they monitor and regulation their own behavior according to internalized gender norms.

• Self-efficacy: a persons belief in their ability to accomplish something, efficacy beliefs affect the goals we set for ourselves, how much time and effort we put into attaining a goal, and whether we persist in the face of difficulties.

  • People with strong efficacy beliefs redouble their efforts in the face of challenges, whereas those with low sense of efficacy give up.

  • These beliefs play a large role in career choice and pursuing a career, perhaps over many years of necessary education.

• Piaget and Inhelder’s cognitive principles:

  • Errors made in answering questions does not indicate the children were stupid or ignorant, but rather they have different cognitive organization from that of adults

  • Cognitive organizations of children change systematically over time, and they made a stage theory of cognitive development to describe this progression.

  • Importance of the child constructing their own development.

• Gender Constancy: the understanding that gender is stable and consistent part of oneself; when a child has gender constancy they can conserve gender and achieving gender constancy is a process that begins with acquiring gender identity.

• Gender Identity: the first stage of gender constancy development, in which children can identify and label their own gender and the gender of others.

• Learning: Gender role learning is not entirely imposed by external forces, but rather is self-motivated and reflects children’s engagement with their social environment.

  • Child engages in self-socialization and self-selects the behaviors to be learn and performed on the basis of rules regarding the gender appropriateness of the behavior.

• Justice perspective: moral reasoning that emphasizes fairness

• Care perspective: moral reasoning that emphasizes relationships

• Gender schema: a schema is a way to categorize and organize information, to filter and interpret info, and can therefore cause errors in recollection of information. A gender schema is one’s general framework about gender.

  • organization of information on the basis of gender-linked associations, represents our tendency to see many things as gender-related our tendency to dichotomize things on the basis of gender

  • the developmental process of gender typing or gender role acquisition in children is a result of the child’s gradual learning of the content of their culture’s gender schema.

  • Gender schema and Self-concept: Gender schema can be central to self-concept for some individuals; gender schematic individuals are traditionally masculine men and feminine women, whereas gender aschematic individuals are less gender-typed.

• Evidence for gender schema: classic study by SL Bem, with masculine, feminine, and neutral words; when told to recall works, gender-typed people tended to cluster words according to gender, a result that supports gender schema theory.

• Sociobiology: application of evolutionary theory to explaining social behavior of animals, including people.

• Natural selection: Darwin, process where the fittest animals survive and reproduce to pass their genes to the next gen.

  • Darwin’s observation - living things over-produce but population still remains relatively constant because many do not survive, differential survival levels.

• Evolutionary fitness: an animal’s relative contribution of genes to the next generation, where fittest individuals will produce the most offspring.

  • Evolutionary theory of Natural Selection: Genes that produce fitness characteristics become more frequent, and fitness characteristics become more frequent, while genes that produce poor fitness become less frequent.

  • Can be applied to social behaviors,, caring for one’s young would be adaptive while female infanticide would be maladaptive, because one increases reproductive fitness while the other decreases it.

• Parental investment: behaviors or other investments in offspring by the parent that increase the offspring’s chance of survival.

  • Females of a species generally have a much larger parental investment in their offspring than males do. Eggs are precious and require a bigger investment from the female while sperm is “cheap” and males are invested relatively little.

  • Women and child care: Greater parental investment for women and maternity is always certain, while paternity is not, so that’s why women are the ones doing the child care.

• Evolvement of female orgasm: Sociobiologists argue that human female orgasm has evolved because human babies are born particularly helpless, dependent, and in need of parental care.

  • A monogamous mating system with a pairing of mother and father would be adaptive and favored in evolution, so the female orgasm evolved to hold together this permanent pair.

• Double standard: Holding more conservative attitudes towards female sexuality, a tolerance of male promiscuity and disapproval of female promiscuity.

• Sexual Selection: processes by which members of one gender compete with each other for mating privileges with members of another gender. Usually males fighting each other for access to females.

  • Two processes of sexual selection: (1) members of one gender, usually males, compete among themselves to gain mating privileges with members of the other gender, usually females. And (2) members of the other gender, usually females, have preferences for certain members of the first gender, usually males, and decide which of them they are willing to mate with. Process (1) explains why the males of most species are larger and more aggressive than the females, aggression is adaptive for males in competition, and they are the product of sexual selection.

• Evolutionary psychology: theory that humans’ complex psychological mechanisms are a result of evolutionary selection. Proposed by David Buss and others.

• Sexual Strategies theory: a way of articulating the evolved psychological mechanisms that are related to sexuality and explain certain psychological gender differences. Proposes that women and men had different problems to solve in short-term as well as long-term mating.

  • Men put more energy into short-term mating because it is to men’s evolutionary advantage to inseminate as many women as possible

  • Women put more energy into long-term mating because they ensure the survival of their offspring.

• Sexual infidelity: men are notoriously jealous of their mates’ sexual infidelity because of the problem of paternity certainty. A women will be more jealous if her male develops an emotional connection to another woman (termed emotional infidelity) because it represents a threat to the resources she needs for herself and her baby.

• Sociobiologists believe men have greater aggression because of sexual selection and their genes, and they are genetically dominant while women are genetically subordinate.

  • Sociologists emphasize biology while feminists emphasize environment.

• Feminist critique of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: sexist bias to ignore and minimize the significance of the active role of women in evolution, they argue that Darwin’s portrayal of “females as passive” is inaccurate and androcentric. Evolutionary psychology has also paid little attention to mothering and women’s role in the ancestral diet. The theories also marginalize people outside the gender binary.

• Devendra Singh: did research and presented evidence that women with a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.70 are judged by men to be the most attractive. But cultures vary in their beauty standards and this is not representative of other cultures.

• Heteronormativity: Belief that heterosexuality is the norm.

  • Evolutionary psychology seems deeply rooted in heteronormativity and the gender binary.

  • Charlotte Tate: proposed an intersectional feminist approach to evolutionary psychology that avoids the assumptions of heteronormativity and the gender binary.

• 3 Core Components of a Feminist approach: (1) think critically about sex and gender, (2) explicitly recognizing women as active agents in evolutionary processes, and (3) explicitly recognizing women as active agents in human dynamics, including those related to sexual selection and competition for mates.

• Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: describes the crucial and complicated role of mothering in evolution, talks about evolutionary forced on mothering too. That women have evolved to care for their children and ensure their survival, in ways that subvert traditional gender roles and the idea that women are all-loving and self-sacrificing mothers.

• Gender-Neutral Evolutionary Theory: Gender-neutral alternative to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology theory proposed by Patricia Gowaty; most adaptive for individuals to be flexible in their behaviors, and that is exactly what evolution selects for, flexibility and adaptability

  • An individual may behave in ways that are more male-typical in some situations and more female-typical in others, because different behaviors are adaptive in those different situations. -- a flexible mating strategy that would be more successful

  • Changing mating behaviors in adaptive ways depending on environment - best reproductive fitness

  • Theory accommodates trans and nonbinary individuals

• Social role theory: Emphasizes variability across cultures in patterns of gender differences, society’s division of labor by gender drives all other gender differences in behavior. Psychological gender differences result from individuals’ accommodations or adaptations to the particular restrictions on or opportunities for their gender in society.

  • acknowledges biological differences between male and female bodies and emphasizes these differences are important because they are amplified by cultural beliefs and these physical differences lead to the dominant behavior of men and subordinate behavior of women.

• Analysis by Eagly and Wood: they reanalyzed David Buss’s 37-cultures data to test the predictions of social role theory, found that in countries where opportunities for men and women were more equal, men and women were more similar. These findings provide powerful evidence in support of social role theory.

• Feminist theories: viewing gender similar to a class variable; gender confers status and power. Men and women are of unequal status, women have lower status

  • Males are dominant, female subordination, and sexism is pervasive, leading to women discrimination

  • Four basic sources of power: The threat of violence or potential to harm, economic power or control of resources, ability of the powerful group to promote their ideologies, and relational power.

• Intersectionality: term coined by scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, considers the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage simultaneously. This is a critical theory and not scientific so it does not have to be held to the standard of falsifiability.

• Queer theory: One’s gender identity, and sexual orientation is not fixed and can change, it’s dynamic and fluid. This theory challenges binaries and challenges heteronormativity.

• The feminist perspective is in close agreement with social learning theory.

  • Feminists view the sources of women’s problems being external.

• Consciousness raising: The consciousness–raising (C–R) groups begin with a few women sharing their personal feelings and experiences. They then move to a feminist theoretical analysis of these feelings and experiences. Next involves action, whether it involves an individual woman restructuring her relationship with her partner or a group of women lobbying for a new law to be passed. A great deal of consciousness raising now occurs on social media. An example of this is the #MeToo movement. The process of consciousness raising remains central to feminism and is a common feature of many gender and women’s studies courses.

The seven types of feminism:

• Liberal feminism: women should have equal opportunities and rights to men, and this is possible to achieve by working within the system. Justice and freedom need to be extended fully to women. Exemplified by organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW).

• Cultural feminism: Care-focused feminism, argues that women have special and unique qualities that differentiate them from men. The task is to elevate these unique qualities, which patriarchal society has devalued. These unique values include nurturing, connectedness, and intuition.

• Marxist/socialist feminism: argues that liberal feminist analysis is superficial and does not get to the deeper roots of the problem. Grounded in the works of Karl Marx + Friedrich Engels, views the oppression of women as just one instance of oppression based on class, oppression that is rooted in capitalism. Theorizes that patriarchy exists within capitalism, pointing out the extent to which the capitalist system benefits from oppressing women in ways such as wage discrimination. Patriarchy is rooted in capitalism.

• Radical feminism: Views liberal feminism as entirely too optimistic about the sources of women’s oppression. Radical-libertarian feminists argue that femininity limits women’s development and instead they advocate for androgyny among women. Radical-cultural feminists argue that femininity and feminine values are preferable to masculinity and masculine values.

• Existentialist/postmodern feminism: questions the rationality and objectivity as methods for getting at truth. Academic movement that seeks to reform thought and scholarship. Particularly concerned with the issue of epistemology. Advocates social constructionism. Where is this information coming from and why does it exist?

• Women of color feminism: highlights unique experiences of women of color as members of multiply marginalized groups and thus promotes a more inclusive and intersectional feminist perspective.

  • Critical of White feminists for focusing on “universal” female experiences such as reproductive justice and neglecting the diversity of women’s experiences.

• Ecofeminism: links women’s oppression to human beings’ domination of nature and is articulated by activists/scholars. Points out that women are often culturally tied to nature and this patriarchy is dualistic and oppressive, and harms both women and nature. Has deep roots in the environmental justice movement, as well as the issue of people of color and social class. Issues such as climate change and sustainability are understood as intertwined with gender, racial, and class equality and well-being, as well as colonialism. Values such as interdependence and interconnection are central to all of them.

• Feminist theories span many disciplines and were not specifically proposed as scientific theories that could be tested, but rather as critical theories that articulate a prescription for social change

  • Some of their propositions are difficult to evaluate scientifically.

• Many scientific theories have been reformulated with a feminist approach or perspective, and we review the research on those reformulated theories.