POW Chapter 1: Introduction

Advances in medical technology:

• helps parents obtain relatively detailed ultrasound images of the developing fetus, gender: whether the baby is male or female

• used to identify the fetus’s genitals

• son, or daughter

world: based on gender

• we tend to have a hard time thinking about a person without knowing their gender

• our social world is organized on the basis of gender

  • segregation of restrooms, social clubs and organizations, sports teams

Power and status: through gender:

• power and status are conferred by gender

• men have more power and status when compared to women

Cisgender:

• a person whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth

• cisgender men have dominated in society and in psychological science

Importance of study of psych:

• psychology of women and gender courses: unique and provocative

• this study is personally meaningful and essential to psychology and to understand society

Sexism or gender bias:

• sexism or gender bias exists in our everyday experience

• it exists in the science of psychology

Critical thinking: gender psychology

• critical thinking about gender types

• to learn psychology of women and transgender

“The personal is political”:

• the theme of the feminist movement has been “the personal is political”, culture is important for knowledge gaining

• Culture improves the conditions in which we all live

Meanings and connotations of words:

• these are in flux, can lead to misunderstandings and different interpretations

Sex: sex is physical or psychological characteristics of maleness and femaleness

• term sex is often used ambiguously

Gender: The state of being male, female, both male and female, or neither male nor female

Gender binary: a system of conceptualizing gender as having two distinct and opposing groups or kinds (i.e., male and female)

Genderqueer/nonbinary: a gender category that is not exclusively male or female and therefore is not captured by the gender binary, may also be known as nonbinary

Transgender: describes a person whose gender differs from the one assigned at birth

• not all people whose self-identified gender differs from their birth-assigned gender will call themselves transgender

• The prefixes cis- (on the same side of) and trans- (across or on the other side of) come from Latin

Cisgenderism: prejudice against people who are outside the gender binary; also refers to bias that recognizes a person’s birth-assigned gender but not their gender identity. Also termed as anti-trans prejudice or cissexism

Gender differences:

• used to refer to differences between men and women, it is rooted in the gender binary

Sex differences/gender differences:

• sex differences: used to refer to innate or biologically produced differences between men and women

• gender differences: male-female differences resulting from learning and the man-woman social roles/gender roles

Sexism: discrimination or bias against other people based on their gender, also termed gender bias or sex bias

Old fashioned sexism: open or overt prejudice against women

Modern sexism/neosexism: is more subtle than old fashioned sexism and consists of 3 components: denial that there is continuing discrimination against women, antagonistic feelings about women’s “demands”, and resentment about perceived special favors granted to women

Experiences with sexism:

• they are widespread and harmful, have negative effects on women’s mental health

• mainly experienced by women from diverse racial/ethnic groups

Hostile sexism: Negative, hostile attitudes toward women and adversarial beliefs about gender relations

Benevolent sexism: Women seen as pure and superior

• Beliefs about women that seem to be kind or benevolent; women are seen as pure and morally superior beings who should be protected and adored

• Reaffirms gender inequality and stereotypes women as weak and dependent on men

• Husband says he will work outside while wife stays home - “I don’t want you getting hurt”,, promotes the idea that women should be submissive

Feminist: a person who favors political, economic, and social equality of all people, regardless of gender, and therefore favors the legal and social changes necessary to achieve gender equality

Four waves of feminism: First wave, Second, third, and fourth wave

• First: occurred in late 1800s and early 1900s in Britain, Canada, and US

  • fought for many aspects of gender equality-- particularly women’s suffrage

• Second: Began in the 1960s and extended into the 1990s

  • Feminists took a much wider range of issues: sexual freedom, reproductive rights, especially access to contraception and abortion, pay equity, equal opportunity in education, and gender-based violence

  • Proposed the Equal Rights Amendment in the US Constitution

• Third: Began to emerge sometime in the 1990s

  • represents a rebellion against second-wave foremothers and attempts to rectify some of the perceived weaknesses of the second wave

  • emphasized intersectionality and diversity among women rather than universality of female experience

  • favors the individual’s right to define feminism, instead of everyone accepting a uniform ideology

• Fourth: Currently going on, fueled by recent advances in online technology, including user-generated content, such as blog, and social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

  • The #MeToo Movement -- founded in 2006, supports survivors of sexual violence, organization called Just Be Inc., survivors supporting survivors, access to resources for healing, where survivors can find justice, started to empower a community of women of color

  • An example of activism, and it demonstrates the possibilities of leveraging online technology within activism.

  • Includes greater emphasis on Intersectionality and critique and rejection of the gender binary.

  • Intersectionality: the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and oppression and we must consider everything and anything that can marginalize people – gender, race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.

Feminine evil: The belief that women are the source of evil or immorality in the world, as in the Adam and Eve story.

• Mythology - Greek: Zeus and Pandora, Chinese: yin and yang

• Persecution of witches: Middle Ages; majority of those accused and tried were women

Male as Normative: a model in which the male is seen as the norm for all humans and the female is seen as a deviation from the norm

• The word man is used to refer to not only to a male person, but to people in general

• Androcentrism: Male centered; the belief that the male is the norm

• Lower social status of women stemming from androcentrism; women do not enjoy same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as men

Gender differences: differences between genders

Gender similarities: similarities among genders

Scientific and nonscientific views of women: have concentrated on how they differ from men

• led to a distorted understanding of the psychology of women and gender

• Study of psychological gender similarities is important to a comprehensive and unbiased psychology of women and gender

Female deficit models: the overemphasis on gender differences combined with male-as-normative thinking have promoted female deficit models

• 19th century: scientists found that women had slightly smaller brains than men and interpreted this as a sure reason for why women were not as intelligent as men.

Problems with the binary:

• it excludes anyone who is trans, intersex, nonbinary, or gender-fluid.

• Assumes that our gender category is apparent at birth, stable over time, and meaningful to our own self-perceptions

• The binary is essentialist and assumes that our gender identities stem from these physical characteristics; assumes that everyone is cisgender

Intersex: a variety of conditions in which a person is born with genitals or reproductive anatomy that is not typical of females or males

• Also termed disorders of sex development in the DSM-5 and differences of sex development or genital diversity

Intersectionality: a feminist approach that simultaneously considers the meaning and consequences of multiple categories of identity, difference, and disadvantage

• Ex: We should not consider the effects of gender in isolation; consider the experience and effects of gender alongside race, social class, and sexual orientation simultaneously

• Sojourner Truth: black abolitionist and women’s rights activist described as the essence of intersectionality, gave speech I am a Woman at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851

  • Theme: femininity and womanhood had often been defined with white, upper class women in mind, and thus the experiences of poor women and women of color were being marginalized + made invisible

  • Recognized that diversity and giving voice to everyone no matter what race, socioeconomic status, is central to intersectionality

  • Intersectionality holds both the diversity and commonality of experiences of people who are oppressed.

Critical theory: a theoretical perspective that seeks to redress power inequalities and achieve equity and equality

• Multiple Disadvantages: poor Black women or lesbian women of color

• Part of privileged and disadvantaged group: white women w/ disabilities

• Transgender, cisgender women: may experience their gender in some ways that are different and some ways that are similar

Gender is not a biologically created fact: Feminist theorist view gender not as a biologically created fact or truth, but as a socially constructed phenomenon.

Social constructionism: A theoretical viewpoint that humans do not discover reality directly, rather, they construct meaning for events in the environment based on their own prior experiences and beliefs

• Gender binary concept: is a product of social interactions and culture; in European American cultures the binary is assumed by most people… but in other cultures like among American Indian tribe there is a third category of gender

• Two Spirit: Among some American Indian tribes, a gender category for individuals who feel they possess both male and female spirits

Processes closely related to gender: They are also socially constructed, like with childbirth:

• Americans adopt the idea that women typically feel tired after childbirth

• Ainu of Japan and the Timbira of Brazil: rituals that assume the father is the main contributor of effort in childbirth, father rests while mother returns to work

Gender: person/stimulus variable

• Gender is a person variable, meaning it is a characteristic of the individual

• Gender is also a stimulus variable, meaning that a person’s gender has a profound impact on the way others react to that person

• Research in which the gender of an infant impacted the type of responses given to each infant by participants.

Social construction: 3 areas -

• First area - the individual engages in social constructions, for example, reaction to another person differently depending on whether that person is male or female

• Second area - The society or culture provides a set of social constructions of gender, for example, whether there are two genders or more

• Third area - Scientists socially construct gender by the way they construct their research

Challenges the belief: science is objective:

• The view that gender is socially constructed challenges the belief that science is fundamentally objective

• Scientific knowledge is shaped by the values and assumptions of the scientist

• If scientists think of themselves as objective, and the result will be science that further marginalizes women and nonbinary people

Internal/External determinants of behavior:

• Is human behavior determined more by internal factors, such as a person’s enduring personality traits, or more by external factors, such as the particular situation the person is in?? → People’s behavior can be inconsistent from one situation to another, so one’s behavior is more determined by the particular situation they are in.

Evaluate future studies about gender: It is very important that you be able to evaluate future studies about gender. Three skills needed:

• (1) Know how psychologists go about doing research, (2) Be aware of ways in which gender bias may affect research, and (3) Be aware of problems that may exist in research on gender roles or in the psychology of women

Development of critical thinking skills: valuable skill, feminist perspective encourages critical thinking about research theory

Theoretical model:

• (1) Scientist starts with some theoretical model, whether a formal model, or a set of personal assumptions

• (2) then a question is formed

• (3) purpose of the research is to answer question

• (4) Design research, several substeps involved

• (5) A behavior must be selected, a way to measure the behavior (most fundamental aspect of quantitative psychological research), a group of participants, and a research design

• (6) collect, analyze data, often analyzed used statistics then interpreted

• (7) Publish research; results are fed into the theoretical models that other scientists will use in formulating new research

Biased theoretical models: Gender bias may enter if the scientist begins the research with a biased theoretical model, It is important to be sensitive to the theoretical orientation of a scientist reporting a piece of research b/c that orientation affects the rest of the research and the conclusions drawn <---

• Psychoanalytical orientation: A person with a psychoanalytical orientation might design research to document the presence of penis envy or immature superego in women

  • a person with a different theoretical orientation wouldn’t even think to ask such questions.

• How to overcome this bias: go to the community of people to be studied and ask them about their lives and what the significant questions are, lay a firm foundation first beginning from their experiences and perspectives.

Research methods in psychology:

• Research methods in psychology can be roughly classified into two categories - laboratory experiments (participant bought into psychologist’s laboratory and their behavior is manipulated in some way) and naturalistic observations (scientists observing behavior as it occurs, no attempt to manipulate)

True experiments must always include: (a) the researcher randomly assigning participants into conditions, (b) some kind of experimental control to rule out confounds, and (c) the manipulation of an independent variable

Quasi-experimental design: A research design that compares two or more groups but is not a true experiment because participants are not randomly assigned to groups; an example is a study comparing men and women

Quantitative research methods: Research methods that involve psychological measurement and the use of statistics to analyze data, often with goal of generalizing from a sample to a population

• Psychological measurement: the processes of assigning numbers to people’s characteristics, such as aggressiveness or intelligence; essential to quantitative methods

If women score lower than men on a particular psychological test, the Interpretation is usually that (1) women are not as skilled at the ability being measures, or (2) the gender difference simply indicates that the test itself contained biased items.

Sampling: area of gender bias: Another area of gender bias in research design has to do with sampling

• Women remain underrepresented as participants in biomedical and neuroscience research

• In psychological research, overreliance on male participants

Overgeneralization: a research error in which the results are said to apply to all cases

Psychologists have been guilty of an overreliance on college student samples, which are typically homogeneous in several ways, including age, race/ethnicity, and social class (mainly ages 18-22, White, and middle class)

Experimenter effects vs Observer effects:

• Experimenter Effects: when some characteristics of the experimenter affect the way participants behave and therefore affects the research outcome

  • different outcomes depending on whether the experimenter is a man, woman, person of color, white, or depending on what clothes are worn.

  • solution is to have several experimenters collect the data, half of them female, half of them male

• Observer Effects: when the researcher’s expectations affect their observations and recording of the data; also called rater bias

  • these stereotyped expectations might lead scientists to find stereotyped gender differences in behavior where there are none

  • blind studies can guard against observer effects

  • blind method is virtually impossible in gender research -- as gender can be obvious from appearance

  • exception - infants and children, who are more difficult to identify which gender

Data getting collected and analyzed statistically - at this stage is where gender bias may enter

One experiment found that after taking an exam, men estimated they got a higher score than their actual score, while women estimated they got lower than their actual score

• interpretation is that the result indicates woman lack self-confidence

• the interpretation that is not made, is that men have unrealistically high expectations for their own performance.

female deficit model: a theory or interpretation of research in which women’s behavior is seen as deficient -- women cant meet the standards,, bias against women

Bias in Publishing findings - a strong tendency in psychological research to publish significant results only, significant is in the sense of being the result of a statistical test that reaches .05 level of significance

There is a tendency to report statistically significant gender differences and to omit mention of gender similarities and nonsignificant gender differences.

• there would be a bias toward emphasizing gender differences and ignoring gender similarities

• This bias may also enter into psychology of women and gender research when results are inconsistent with gender stereotypes or gender roles, for example, research on menstrual cycle mood fluctuations

Tendency for Women scientists’ reports to be considered less authoritative than reports of male scientists → introduces bias, underrepresentation of women as lead authors of scientific journal articles and conference presentations

Female scientists have their research less cited than male scientists, men more likely to publish their citations than women, and research by men gets more attention.

Theoretical orientation: the point is to learn to think critically about biases that may or may not be present when you are reading reports of research

Many question whether psychological research can be objective and value-free, psychological research might be viewed as an interaction between the researcher and research participant that occurs in a particular context.

• acknowledging our values and reflecting on how they may shape the research process is crucial.

Characteristics of gender-fair research (research that is free of gender bias):

• single-gender research should rarely be done → even though single-gender research design might seem justified in certain situation, gender-fair might allow for better understanding and inclusiveness

• theoretical models, underlying assumptions, and the kinds of questions asked should be examples for gender fairness

• research teams should be diverse with regard to gender, as well as other social characteristics like race, ethnicity → to limit experimenter effects

• interpretations should also be maid with fairness, several interpretations should be offered

Feminist research: research growing out of feminist theory, which seeks radical reform of traditional research methods.

Classic form of psychological research: tightly controlled laboratory experiment intended to determine how manipulation of the independent variable causes changes in the dependent variable, it objectifies and dehumanizes the people it studies, and it strips away the context of behavior; taking people out of their natural environments in order to control all of those things the experimenter considers irrelevant.

Recommendations of feminist research: do not manipulate people, observe them in natural environments, do not call people subjects but rather participants, use a two-step methods to determine gender of participants (ask for gender assigned at birth + personal gender identity), do not think in simple terms of Variable A causing effects on Variable B (rather A and B mutually influence each other and are complex, interactive), conduct research aimed at empowering members of marginalized groups

• Keep in mind that scientific research and political activism are not necessarily contradictory activities

One’s values affects scientific theories and research methods uses → high-quality research that documents oppressive or harmful conditions and provides a prescription for eliminating inequities can facilitate social change.

Qualitative research method: Methods that do not use number or statistics but analyze text, in-depth interviews, participant observations, or focus groups for themes and meaning

Mixed methods: Research methods that involve both quantitative and qualitative methods.

Contribution of gender-fair and feminist research:

• The traditional psychological experiment is most effective when combined with naturalistic research examining complex mutual influences

• Feminist researchers value investigation of power violence against women

• Gender-fair research may point out partner violence by men and women alike

• Feminist researchers might reply that intimate partner violence is a gender-based crime and that feminist research should be especially concerned with this systematic form of gender-based oppression.

Some forms of bias still existing in psychological research: bias against transgender people and those outside the gender binary