In this video series we are going to be discussing the complex and for some people
emotional question of what gender is.
Before I even start talking about what we will be covering in this unit, I have to be clear about
what the videos are for. They are an exploration of current and historical psychological theories
of gender, primarily designed to cover what is required on the AQA A-level specification.
I know some people come to my channel for other reasons, but please keep in mind what I will be
discussing here isn’t my own opinions, I will be covering established theories and evaluations of
those theories. Whatever your personal beliefs you're likely to find something in this set
of videos that offends you, in fact I would be surprised if you didn't, I’m looking at you Freud.
The main point is, some people may be coming here to understand themselves a little better,
and that's fine, I hope these videos help you on your journey. But people with a range of beliefs
on gender will find things they agree with and disagree with here. I try to cover all of this in
a respectful way, and I would expect the same in the comments section. While I’m happy for you to
debate what you hear, please keep what you say respectful to whoever may be reading.
So, what’s in the unit? first we will discuss what the differences are between the terms
sex and gender, and how psychologists even try to define someone’s gender.
We will then spend a video looking at biological explanations for gender development,
including some interesting variations on the typical male XX and female XY chromosome pattern.
We will then explain gender development with three competing perspectives.
In the cognitive explanation Kohlberg will explain how an understanding of gender develops as we
mature and become aware of our own and others gender. Freud will explain gender development
as due to early interactions with our mothers and fathers, ultimately identifying with and imitating
our same sex parent. Social learning theorists will suggest we develop our gendered behaviours
through seeing others praised for sex appropriate gendered behaviour or being praised ourselves.
And finally, we will consider A-typical gender development, examining the theories that attempt
to explain why some people experience a miss-match between their sex and gender. Lets get started
SEX AND GENDER
When talking about sex and gender it’s easy to
get confused about which term is correct for a particular context.
When psychologists use the term Sex what they mean is the biological differences between males and
females. This is both the genetic differences, and anatomical differences. So this means biological
sex is assigned to someone at the moment of conception, and this is due to inheriting either
an XX sex chromosome for females, or a XY sex chromosome for males. Sex is assigned from birth.
Now keep in mind this definition for sex will come a little more blurry when discussing Atypical sex
chromosomes. And we will discuss those in the next video when we come to biological explanations.
When psychologists use the term gender, they are referring to behavioural differences,
distinguishing between what are thought to be typical masculine and feminine personality
traits. Here is a short list of traits that are often considered masculine and feminine,
but an important point to make right away is this means someone's gender identity may not
necessarily match what is traditionally expected from their biological sex.
When we think of the set of behaviours that are expect from males and females from society
this is what we call a “sex role stereotype”. This set of expected behaviours can vary significantly
between cultures. But within our own culture we use a shared set of sex role stereotypes
to predict other people’s behaviour and decide how to behave ourselves.
You may be sitting there thinking, well I don’t have any sex role stereotypes. But we all do,
as an example, I don’t feel like I’m particularly concerned with being seen as a masculine man,
I’m not interested in football or other stereotypical manly interests.
But when picking my outfit for class I’m going to pick a suit,
not a dress. Now that's not because I think there are any problems with men in dresses.
There are a few reasons I wouldn’t pick a dress.
But one of the main reasons I don't pick a dress is because I’m aware
everybody I interact with that day has a very strong set of “sex role stereotypes”, expectations
that I would have just completely broken. Dresses are not an expected uniform for male teachers.
Now some people, perhaps yourself, would react positively, some negatively, that's not the point.
The point is everyone will react. If I turned up in a dress, I would have to spend
all day talking to people about why I have decided to wear what I have,
but if I turned up for class as usual in my suit, obviously no one would think twice.
Now the psychological processes we go through to develop these sex role stereotypes
depend on your psychological perspective. I won't go into
more detail here as when we cover cognitive, social learning theory and psychodynamics
we will be discussing the different arguments for the development of sex role stereotypes.
So, to be clear, when classifying someone's gender we would argue that someone is feminine
if they have a large number and strongly expressed feminine traits and so masculine if they have high
levels of masculine traits. Simple so far. But what if someone has high levels of masculine and
feminine traits but this is balanced between the two? Well, we would call those people androgynous.
Examples of famous androgynous celebrities are David Bowie, Lady Gaga and Johnny Depp.
Now there is one more option, if someone has few strong traits of
either gender. In this case they would be called undifferentiated.
Sandra Bem developed a way to measure gender using Bem’s sex role inventory. This is a 60-question
questionnaire that asks you to rate yourself out of seven on a range of personality traits.
Of these 60 traits 20 are thought to be masculine, 20 feminine and the final 20
are neutral. So from your responses you can be scored on two dimensions, masculine and feminine.
Now Bem argued that androgenous people, those with high and balanced masculine and feminine traits
are more psychologically healthy than other types.
Evaluations
Let's consider Bem’s own research as evaluative evidence for gender. She measured 561 males and
356 females using the BSRI, finding that perhaps unsurprisingly that most males were sex-typed with
masculine personality types, and most females sex-typed with female personality types.
So this provides evidence for the concept of distinct sets of sex typical gendered
personality traits. But bem also provides evidence in this study for androgyny,
with 34% of males and 27% of females classified as androgenous.
One issue with Bem’s original study was that she did not include a category for people with
few masculine or feminine traits, but she later updated her model to include undifferentiated.
Now Bem did claim that androgynous people were better adapted, is there any evidence for that?
Adams and Sherer used the BSRI on 101 university students, alongside other personality tests.
What they actually found was that it was the masculine males
and females that appeared to be best adjusted on a range of measures
including assertiveness and self-efficacy. Obviously that counters Bem’s theory.
But let's think about this a little deeper,
maybe the reason for this finding is we live in a male dominated society, because of this it's
highly competitive. In a world like this assertiveness is helpful. But if we had a
more equal society, perhaps an androgenous personality type would be more beneficial.
Now that was two research evaluations, I’m going to give a few evaluations of Bem’s work,
partially because it gives me a chance to talk about some research methods concepts,
I want to make sure you are familiar with. You may not want to memorise all
of this but perhaps keep the ones you feel you can express best in an exam.
Firstly, if you give the BSRI to people multiple times
they tend to get the same score. This is test-retest reliability.
This both suggests the BSRI is accurately measuring gender and gender is stable over time.
But there is the issue of temporal validity, looking at some of Bem’s trait’s we may not
agree with some of them because of changes in society and our understanding of social roles.
After all “childlike” and “gullible” are two traits Bem assigned as feminine.
But a significant positive of Bem’s work is it helped to establish that
gender identity is separate from and can be different to biological sex.
This and the positive promotion of androgyny may have had positive effects on society,
leading to less discrimination of people who lead non-gender normative lives.
But it can be argued that a BSRI score vastly oversimplifies someone's experience of their
own gender. We will often change how we act depending on the context and who we are with.
Perhaps more masculine when with workmates and formal occasions,
but more feminine when spending time with family members.
And finally, the BSRI was created using western students. This sampling bias means
it may have limited generalisability to older age groups or other cultures.
And finally, as sex role stereotypes is mentioned here on the specification
I’m going to mention some evaluations. These evaluation appear again when we get into
other sections of the unit, but if you're planning an essay in this area
and your asked to evaluate sex role stereotypes these may help.
Smith and Lloyd got 32 mothers who had recently had their first child
to be participants, and told them they were doing a study investigating play.
They then introduced them to a stranger's 6 month old baby and asked them simply to play
with the baby for 10 minutes in a room with a selection of toys.
The researchers recorded the participant playing with the baby from a hidden camera.
Now the babies used were either biologically male or female, and they were either given
sex appropriate names and clothes or they were given crossed sex names and clothes.
So half the time the mothers were playing with babies that were dressed and named in a way that
made them think they were the opposite sex. I think you can guess what the researchers found.
When measuring first toy choice
the masculine squeaky hammer toy was only ever given to the babies dressed as males,
and the feminine doll was only given as first toy choice to the babies dressed
as females. So the infants are being encouraged immediately to play with gender appropriate toys.
Not only that, but the researchers assessed how the babies were encouraged in their play,
and what they found was the babies dressed as boys were given significantly more encouragement
for large physical actions like attempting to crawl or walk,
showing even as infants boys are encouraged to be more athletic and be confident in taking risks.
So pretty good evidence there of the mother’s play style being shaped by their sex role stereotypes.
There is a BBC clip of a replication of this study
you can see on YouTube that's really worth a watch. I will leave a link to it.
In a completely different direction is Mead, in the 1930’s her work with tribal
communities around the world gave a view into groups of people whose cultures had
developed in isolation. In New guinea three communities had very unusual gender roles.
In the Mundugumor tribe both genders were highly aggressive and competitive, traits usually
associated with masculinity. The Arapesh had males and females showing feminine caring behaviour.
The Tchambuli people had completely reversed gender roles.
This culture expected females to show leadership and dominance
while males were passive, emotional and were responsible for child rearing.
The fact that human communities can vary so radically suggests gender stereotypes exist,
that gender roles are a product of culture and learnt via socialisation and what we
see as male and female behaviour is not a fundamental biological process.
We could consider if sex roles stereotypes is now lacking in temporal validity. Ideas have changed,
the cultural changes in society around the role of men and women
has influenced childrearing, with children not as expected to perform sex typed behaviours.
In addition to more gender neutral clothes and toys being more common,
so it may be that the theory of sex role stereotypes is becoming less relevant.
And a last point. There is clearly still gender based discrimination in society.
People who hold strong stereotypical expectations of gendered behaviour may decide to hire or not
hire someone on the basis of expectations that are biased in favour of one gender or another.
Psychological research resulting in a deeper understanding of the origins
and development of gender may help counter this kind of discrimination.
Here is a real gender exam question from 2018 on Bem’s research. Give it a go see how you do.
I want to thank everyone who has supported this channel over on Patreon during the
development of the gender unit. You help make the development of these free A-level videos possible.
If you are a psych boost patron at the neuron level and above you can
access 6 bonus gender tutorial videos over on psych boost.com.
In them I will talk you through a model answer for the exam questions,
and I will talk you through some general exam tips based on the examiner reports.
for everyone else don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the videos released
right up to your exams, and I will see you in the next psych boost video. Cognitive explanations
of gender development.