GENDER BIAS

UNIVERSALITY → Conclusions drawn can be applied to everyone, anywhere, regardless of time or culture

GENDER BIAS → Offers a view that does not justifiably represent the experience and behaviour of men or women

~ALPHA BIAS~

  • Psychological theories that suggest there are real and enduring differences between men and women

  • These may enhance or undervalue members of either sex, but typically females

  • Freud’s ideas about psychosexual development can be criticised for alpha bias

~BETA BIAS~

  • Theories that ignore or minimise differences between the sexes

  • Asch’s conformity studies can be criticised for beta bias due to them only involving male participants, and yet the findings were still generalised to females

~ANDROCENTRISM~

  • Alpha and beta bias are both consequences of androcentrism

  • Male-centred

  • When research is conducted using only males, ‘normal’ behaviour is judged according to a male standard

EVALUATION

Conflicting Evidence:

→ BIOLOGICAL VERSUS SOCIAL EXPLANATIONS

  • One limitation is that gender differences are often presented as fixed and enduring when they are not.

  • Psychologists presented the findings of several gender studies which concluded that girls have superior verbal ability whereas boys have better spatial ability.

  • Psychologists suggested that these differences are ‘hardwired’ into the brain before birth. Such findings are now seen as facts.

  • However, more recent research used brain scanning and found no such gender differences in brain structure or processing.

  • This suggests that we should be wary of accepting research findings as biological facts when they might be explained better as social stereotypes.

  • However, this does not mean that psychologists should avoid studying possible gender differences in the brain.

  • For example, a psychologist suggests that the popular social stereotype that females are better are multitasking may have some biological truth to it.

  • It seems that a woman’s brain may benefit from better connections between the right and left hemisphere than in a man’s brain.

  • This suggests that there may be biological differences but we should still be wary of exaggerating the effect they may have on behaviour.

→ SEXISM IN RESEARCH

  • Another limitation is that gender bias promotes sexism in the research process.

  • Women remain underrepresented in university departments. Although psychology’s undergraduate intake is mainly female, lecturers in psychology are more likely to be male.

  • This means research is more likely to be conducted by males, and this may disadvantage female participants.

  • For example, a male researcher may expect females to behave irrationally, and such expectations are likely to mean that female participants underperform in research studies.

  • This means that the institutional structures and methods of psychology may produce findings that are gender biased.

→ GENDER-BIASED RESEARCH

  • A further limitation is that research challenging gender biases may not be published.

  • Psychologists analysed more than 1000 articles relating to gender bias, published over 8 years.

  • They found that research on gender bias is funded less often is published by less prestigious journals. The consequence of this is that fewer scholars become aware of it or apply it within their own work.

  • This suggests that gender bias in psychological research may not be taken as seriously as other forms of bias.