Gender and Social Psychology

Vivien Burr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134726912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Gender is an ideal 'applied' topic for social psychology; majority of students on psychology courses are female Author is experienced teacher and author of very successful introductary text on social constructionism Also relevant for other subjects eg. sociology, women's studies Clear, in-depth coverage of area with many applied examples Assumes no prior psychological knowledge Has annotated further reading, glossary of key terms and chapter summaries

Chapter 1

Key issues and perspectives

Why study gender?

It is often the case that what seem to be the most mundane aspects of our lives, those which we rarely question or even think about, are actually quite crucial aspects of our existence as human beings. We are rarely conscious of the air we breathe, or of the act of breathing. Nevertheless, they are fundamental to our continued existence. In the same way, gender is the backcloth against which our daily lives are played out. It suffuses our existence so that, like breathing, it becomes invisible to us because of its familiarity. White says:

It is enough to make the point to ask: of all the things you might potentially fail to register or remember about someone, when did you ever forget what sex someone was, even after the most fleeting encounter? We remember because, whether we wish it so or not, sex is significant and it is this significance that is called gender.

(White, 1989:17–18)

When we begin to examine the minutiae of routine daily life, it soon becomes clear that there is virtually no aspect of it which is not gendered. It is commonplace to remark upon and to question what we now think of as obvious differences and inequalities in the way women and men, boys and girls, behave and are treated. We know about the differences in toys that are thought appropriate for male and female children, about the different roles that women and men play in the family, and about the gender differences in jobs and careers, although it is only in relatively recent times that these differences have become problematised (that is, they have only relatively recently come to be regarded as problems). However, there are many more subtle ways in which our lives are gendered. Here are some examples which I’m sure you can relate to your own experience:

• Women and men differ in their ‘body language’. They carry themselves differently, adopt different postures when seated, and use gestures and expressions differently when talking. In a way, we don’t even have to appeal to research evidence to see that this is so—the antics of the drag queen are funny precisely because he is exploiting these differences.
• In conversation, too, there are differences of which we may be quite unaware at a conscious level (see Swann, 1992). In mixed sex groups, men interrupt more and offer more direct requests and statements, whereas women are more likely to be interrupted, to make indirect requests and to give more conversational ‘support’ to other speakers (by saying ‘Mmm’, ‘Yeah’ etc., or by asking questions).
• When we see someone’s handwriting for the first time, we intuitively feel that we can tell the sex of the writer from its shape and form. Even if we were completely inaccurate in our judgements (which I don’t think we are) it is surely significant that we easily read gender into mundane activities such as writing. (Although I have never seen any research in this area, on the gender course that I teach we begin each year by asking the students to guess whether certain extracts from past students’ assessments were penned by a woman or a man, and the results are surprisingly consistent).
• In countless ways, we mark our gender in our choice of personal possessions when, on the face of it, there are no practical reasons for this gendering. The considerable differences in size and/or styling between ladies’ and men’s wrist-watches, socks, slippers, handkerchiefs, fragrances, jewellery, electric razors and so on cannot be justified solely by physical differences between the sexes. Forty years ago, it would have been a dreadful embarrassment to have one’s hair parted on the wrong side of the head, and today men’s and women’s clothing is still buttoned on opposite sides of the garment.

I earlier used the word ‘subtle’ rather than ‘trivial’ to describe the kinds of differences I have illustrated above partly because attempts to problematise gender differences have been resisted with the argument that these differences are trivial. In the examples shown, it may be argued that these subtle gender differences are intimately bound up in the larger, more obvious gender differences that we are used to thinking about as problems, and that they are therefore in no way trivial, especially for the social scientist.

The examples show, at the very least, that much of our routine daily life embodies clear messages about ‘difference’. When we distinguish between the sexes in ways which do not necessarily have a functional basis, like when children are made to line up as girls and boys at school or when their names are organised by sex on the register, we are imparting strong messages about difference and separateness. The examples can also tell us something about appropriate masculinity and femininity. Given the increasing role that personal possessions are playing in providing our sense of identity, the meanings carried by such things as fluffy slippers or Kleenex for Men provide important information about what it currently means to be appropriately masculine or feminine in the western world. There is also something to be learned about gender relations. Women’s and men’s body language and the pattern of their interactions together are not simply about arbitrary stylistic differences. There are important messages here about how we feel we are able to occupy space (both physical space and linguistic space), and about how conversation between women and men is suffused with power relations.

These things are all implicated in the larger picture, where we can observe the more obvious differences and inequalities between women and men. There is a tendency today to consider the battle for equality largely won, and to say that we now live in a ‘post-feminist’ society (one where feminism is no longer needed). The Equal Pay Act (1970), The Sex Discrimination Act (1975) and the setting up of the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) are markers of a society which acknowledges its own inequalities and is setting about redressing the balance. Nevertheless, despite these measures it is still the case that women and men in contemporary western societies (which are the focus of this book) do not enjoy equality.

Although women make up nearly 50 per cent of the workforce in Britain, on average their pay is approximately two-thirds that of men, and they are more likely than men to be found in low-paid, part-time and insecure employment. Across the range of work sectors, men are more likely than women to occupy high status, powerful positions (this is referred to as the ‘vertical gender division of labour’). In organisations, the managers are generally men and their assistants and secretarial staff women. Even in occupations dominated by women in terms of sheer numbers, such as teaching and nursing, men who enter these professions stand a better than average chance of reaching the top positions. In terms of the kinds of jobs that people do, it is still the case that there are women’s jobs, in the caring and service industries, and men’s jobs, in industry and commerce (this is referred to as the ‘horizontal gender division of labour’). In secondary education, the GCSE and A level subjects taken by girls and boys still show a gender bias, with boys favouring the hard sciences and technology, and girls opting for languages and the humanities (with knock-on consequences for choices of well-paid jobs and careers which are then open to them). In the family, despite the fact that women are entering full- or part-time employment outside of the home, they are still primarily responsible for the running of the household and spend considerably more time in childcare and household tasks than men.

In economic terms, then, women still have a good deal of catching up to do. They are less likely than men to have access to well-paid, secure employment and are more likely to be constrained by domestic responsibilities. In terms of access to non-traditional roles, it can be argued that men also get a raw deal. They may find it difficult to obtain employment in traditionally female areas of work, for example as a nursery nurse or childminder, and it is clear that at least some men feel that their lives do not give them enough opportunities to become fully involved in bringing up their children, or that their own upbringing, as males, has restricted their emotional development and capacity for intimacy.

While we may congratulate ourselves that, for example, women are allowed to own property, have the vote and may prosecute their husbands for rape within marriage, we should not assume that the future will be an uncomplicated story of increasing equality between the sexes, and moves toward equality have often been met by resistance. For example, under the Equal Pay Act, women doing the same work as men must be paid the same wage for it, and after the Act was passed employers were given a period of five years in which to bring their pay practices in line with it. However, in many cases this meant that the time was spent by employers in discovering ways in which the work performed by women could be defined as different from that of men, in order to allow them to continue paying women lower wages.

The social sciences therefore have an important role to play both in explaining gender differences and inequalities and in making recommendations for change. Clearly, the kinds of explanations that we come up with will have direct implications for our understanding of the possibilities and conditions for change. Whether and how we, as psychologists, might address gender inequalities depends upon our understanding of their relation to gender differences and gender relations. In other words, to what extent are gender inequalities based upon and sustained by gender differences (for example differences in personality) or by gender relations (for example marriage and heterosexuality)?

Psychology and the study of gender

Psychology has not ignored these questions in the past, although it has been argued that its approach to them was not driven by a desire to combat inequality and did not escape the bounds of its own patriarchal assumptions (Gilligan 1977, 1982; Eisenstein, 1984; Squire 1989, 1990b). Psychology as a discipline and its handling of gender issues has been subjected to a critical feminist examination and found wanting. It is argued that psychology, like most academic disciplines, is dominated and run by men and reflects their interests and concerns. Academics, often themselves women, who wish to study issues more pertinent to women’s experience often report that their male colleagues do not regard their work as worthwhile or academically respectable (e.g. Ussher’s (1989) account of her work on menstruation).

It is also argued that male experience is assumed as the ‘standard’ to which the psychological processes of both sexes are compared. This means that where women’s experience is different from that of men this difference is obscured. For example, studies of the psychological effects of unemployment or retirement have often used male samples. The effects described are therefore not really generalisable beyond male populations, but this limitation is often not articulated or noticed. In addition to marginalising women’s experience in this way, it is further argued that psychological research has functioned to pathologise women and to find them lacking in some way. For example, Kohlberg (1969) developed a stage theory of moral thinking based upon longitudinal research using all-male samples. He later examined the moral thinking of both boys and girls, evaluating their responses to moral dilemmas. He used the stages of development that he had previously theorised and found that girls’ moral thinking developmentally lagged behind that of boys (Kohlberg and Kramer, 1969). However, Gilligan (1977, 1982) has argued that the two sexes have different ways of assessing moral dilemmas, based upon their different life experiences, and that Kohlberg’s stages, derived as they were from the responses of males, will inevitably distort and misrepresent women’s moral thinking.

Psychology has traditionally described itself as apolitical. It has invested heavily in the idea of itself as an objective, valuefree science and has therefore represented psychological findings as facts which are untainted by vested interests. This view has in recent times been seriously questioned (Sayers, 1982; Sherif, 1987). It is an issue which is wider in its implications than gender alone, and a full discussion of it is therefore not appropriate here, although I will say more about it in Chapter 6. We do not need to go as far as suggesting that psychologists have deliberately falsified their findings in order to satisfy the requirements of those funding the research, whether this be the government, the military or industry. It is sufficient to make the point that we only get answers to the questions that we ask and that it is the reasons why we ask some questions and not others that are informative about psychology’s agenda. For example, nineteenth-century scientists found that women have smaller brains than men and argued that they therefore were unsuited to intellectual pursuits (Sayers, 1982). From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, we may see this as a thinly veiled political attempt to justify women’s exclusion from education. But asking questions about relative brain size has only been superseded by questions about the effects of sex hormones on brain organisation (Moir and Jessel, 1989). The questions that are being asked appear to flow from an assumption that gender differences (and the inequalities linked to them) are ‘hard-wired’ in our biology, and thus more or less resistant to change.

Psychology’s contribution to the study of gender has been concentrated in particular areas, and these too have come under attack. Of all the schools of psychological thought, psychoanalysis has had the most to say about gender and has been tremendously influential. According to Freud, children’s gender identity rests on their recognition that they have (in the case of boys) or don’t have (in the case of girls) a penis. For a boy, this is the symbol of his masculine identity. It is what guarantees that he will eventually take his rightful place in the powerful world of men. Both boys and girls are thought to believe that girls’ lack of a penis is the result of having been castrated (perhaps for some wrong-doing in the past) and boys begin to live in fear of this happening to them too. During the Oedipal phase, when he is about three to five years old, the boy’s increasing sexual awareness becomes directed toward his primary love object, his mother. But he fears that his more distant but powerful father, who is his rival for his mother’s affections, will punish him for these feelings by castrating him. He resolves this conflict by repressing his feelings toward his mother and by identifying with his father, in the knowledge that if he becomes like him he too will eventually be able to establish a sexual relationship with another woman (instead of his mother). In identifying with his father, the boy internalises all that he stands for—the father’s voice of authority and the social norms and mores that he embodies. This is why, Freud argues, men have a highly developed conscience and sense of idealism. By contrast girls, who are aware that their ‘castrated’ state renders them second class citizens, inevitably see their mothers as also castrated and therefore second best. In her identification with her mother, the girl then takes on board a submissive attitude in recognition of her own lower status. In addition, because she has not had to resolve the Oedipal conflict like her brother, she will never gain the strength of character, moral rectitude and idealism of a man.

Freud’s account of gender clearly valorises masculinity and sees femininity as a very poor second. Many objections have been raised against Freud’s views, which nevertheless have been very influential, particularly in medicine and psychiatry, and later feminist psychodynamic theorists have tried to produce psychoanalytic accounts which are not so misogynistic. First, it is argued that the awareness of genital differences may be only one, perhaps minor, factor in the production of gender identity. Furthermore, there seems no defensible reason why we should think of the male rather than the female genitals as superior. Freud just seemed to regard this as a fact rather than as a questionable assumption. A second criticism is that Freud assumes that the father is the primary agent of discipline in the home, whereas in many cases it may be the mother who performs this role. A third major criticism is that, like most psychological accounts, psychoanalytic theory seems to ignore gender as a system of power relations in society. It takes for granted men’s relatively powerful position in the world and does not attempt to analyse the various instances of male domination such as domestic violence and child abuse.

Psychoanalysis itself has been heavily criticised from within psychology. As the discipline began to strive for a scientific image and reputation in the early part of this century, psychoanalysis came to be regarded as unscientific and untestable, and mainstream psychology instead took up with enthusiasm newer and more measurement-oriented approaches, in the form of behaviourism (which objectively studies how behaviours are acquired) and psychometrics (the development of measures and tests of psychological characteristics). Psychometrics has influenced the study of many areas of psychology, and gender is no exception. A major area of research grew up around the study of ‘sex differences’, which measured and documented the differences between women and men in a huge variety of characteristics and behaviours, and around the measurement of masculinity and femininity. However, as with psychoanalysis, gender was again viewed as a fundamentally psychological (rather than socio-psychological or cultural) phenomenon. Sex differences research has since been criticised for failing to interpret its findings from within a more social understanding of gender, and for uncritically accepting prevailing assumptions and stereotypes about the sexes (see Chapter 2), as has research into masculinity and femininity (see Chapter 6). Psychology’s contributions to the study of gender has therefore attracted a good deal of criticism, primarily for its ignorance and neglect of the social and political context of gender, and those working in the field today (often feminists) are more likely to have these matters at the forefront of their analyses.

Key concepts and terms

From what I have said so far, it should be abundantly clear that gender is both a psychological and a social phenomenon. To study only its psychology, only its manifestation at the level of the individual person, is to artificially isolate it from the social, economic and political scene of which it is a part. To properly understand gender as psychologists we must be prepared to step outside of psychology, and so this book will continually weave the work of sociological and feminist writers into the psychological material. In this book and in others that you may read you will meet with a number of terms and concepts which may be unfamiliar to some, and I have therefore included a brief explanation and discussion of them here. The glossary on page 145 provides brief explanations of the technical terms and jargon that appear throughout the book.

sex This is a biological term which refers to the particular chromosomes that are carried in the cells of the body. The twenty-third pair of chromosomes are the sex chromosomes, either XX (female) or XY (male) and (normally) produce the two different patterns of physical development that we associate with men and women. The letters roughly describe the shape of the chromosomes.

gender Gender is the social significance of sex. It refers to the constellation of characteristics and behaviours which come to be differentially associated with and expected of men and women in a particular society, our notions of masculinity and femininity. Such differences may really exist, or they may be only supposed to exist.

sex differences This usually refers to the body of research which has tried to assess the nature and extent of psychological differences between the sexes. An extensive and classic study in this field was carried out by Maccoby and Jacklin (1974).

sex roles ‘Role’ is a sociological term borrowed, as you might guess, from the theatre. It refers to the set of behaviours, duties and expectations attached to occupying a particular social position, like ‘priest’ or ‘police officer’. ‘Sex roles’ therefore refer to the ways we expect women and men to behave. However, role also has an interactional element, and implies reciprocity. You can’t carry off your role as, say, a ‘teacher’ without others who are prepared to take up the role of ‘student’. So sex roles are also about the ways that the behavioural scripts for women and men are played out with respect to each other.

gender division of labour There are a number of ways in which the work that women and men do is apportioned. The ‘vertical gender division of labour’ refers to the fact that men are more likely than women to occupy high status, well paid, secure jobs. The ‘horizontal gender division of labour’ refers to the way that the range of jobs and careers is patterned according to gender. Jobs in the service industries and caring professions are women’s jobs and those in industry and commerce are men’s jobs, both in terms of how these jobs are perceived and in terms of the actual numbers of women and men employed in them. The ‘gender division of labour’ also refers to the separation of work in the public sphere from w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Key issues and perspectives
• Chapter 2 Gender differences in personality
• Chapter 3 Education
• Chapter 4 Work and family
• Chapter 5 Representations and language
• Chapter 6 Gender and psychological research
• Glossary
• References