The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Psychology

Michelle K Ryan, Nyla R Branscombe

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781473971288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Psychology is a unique, state-of-the-art synthesis of the known work, combined with current research trends, in the broad field of gender and psychology. In the past 35 years academic publications on the subject have increased tenfold, and this level of activity as well the diversity of research looks set to increase in the coming years too. The time is ideal for a systematic review of the field.

Contributions come from academics around the world and many different disciplines, and as a result multiple perspectives and a diversity of methodologies are presented to understand gender and its implications for behaviour. Chapters cover a wide variety of topics, theoretical approaches, contexts, and social issues; they also critically examine the key issues and current debates. Both advanced students and scholars will find extensive range and depth in the topics covered across the Handbook?s29 chapters. Published as a single volume, the handbook is aimed at individuals as well as the library market.

The SAGE Handbook of Gender and Psychology will have mass appeal across the field of psychology, including social psychology and gender and psychology, as well a number of other subject groups such as gender studies, sociology, organizational behaviour and political science.

PART I

How Gender is Studied

1

Understanding Gender: Methods, Content, and Controversies

Michelle K. Ryan and Nyla R. Branscombe

Almost 40 years have passed since the publication of Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) seminal work The Psychology of Sex Differences. The book played a crucial role in bringing together the, until then, amorphous literature on gender differences within psychology, and in shaping research in the field in subsequent years. Maccoby and Jacklin’s book is deservedly a classic within psychology, and as such it is a useful reference point from which we can examine the current state of the psychological literature in relation to gender.

In this first chapter we have the twin aims of introducing readers to the exciting contributions to be found in this Sage Handbook of Gender and Psychology, and also to take stock of the current state of the field by examining what has changed over the past 40 years and what has remained the same. In doing so we will identify new approaches and techniques used to examine the role of gender in social behavior, ascertain new questions that have captured researchers’ imaginations, and explore some of the current controversies that have emerged within the field.

HOW WE STUDY GENDER: CONSTANCY AND CHANGE

Over the past 40 years, much has changed in the way in which we do psychology. We now study a broader sample of participants than ever before, new technologies have opened up a range of research questions and the means to address them, and new statistical techniques allow us to investigate more complex research questions. Much of this volume evaluates and integrates the knowledge that we gained, and details the increasingly sophisticated perspectives on gendered phenomena that have emerged.

Although The Psychology of Sex Differences was not a developmental volume per se, it did focus particularly on gender differences in children and adolescents. While this may have been, in part, due to the research interests of the authors, it is also likely that it reflected the consistent underrepresentation of adult women as the subject of psychological research at the time (Gannon, Luchetta, Rhodes, Pardie, & Segrist, 1992). Many psychological studies included few women or had exclusively male participants, but such underrepresentation of female participants was less prevalent in developmental journals of the time (Hegarty & Buechel, 2006). Thus gender comparisons may have been easier to make with children and adolescents than with adults.

It is no longer the case, however, that research on gender concentrates on children. Nor are adult samples any longer limited to men. Indeed, often of late, due to the availability of undergraduate student samples, there is a focus on women, and it is male participants who are more likely to be underrepresented. Thus, as a whole, the chapters in this volume describe research that draws on a much broader sample of individuals than has been true in the past. Indeed, the psychology of gender is often either the psychology of women or the psychology of gender differences. While this may be a reaction to the traditional use of exclusively male samples, it has meant that it is only recently that psychologists have explicitly addressed issues concerning men and masculinity, a focus exemplified by Bosson and her colleagues in Chapter 8 with their discussion of precarious manhood, and by Baumeister in Chapter 17 in his discussion of men’s distinct contribution to culture.

This widening (or deepening) of the psychological participant pool has also allowed for an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by the term ‘developmental’. Developmental gender research is no longer restricted to the study of infants or children, although this period is obviously still important and is reviewed by Bussey in Chapter 6. More recently, and within this volume, developmental issues have been examined across the lifespan – and can include the gendered outcomes of (a) becoming a parent, as discussed in the context of the workplace by Fuegen and Biernat in Chapter 9; (b) of moving countries, as outlined in Deaux and Greenwood’s discussion of the gendered outcomes of immigration (Chapter 15); and (c) increasingly important in our aging society, within older age, as discussed by Kemper in Chapter 10.

While this more inclusive sampling across the lifespan has certainly broadened the gender research agenda over the past 40 years, this is not to say that there is no room for continued improvement. As outlined by Hegarty and his colleagues in Chapter 3, research on gender is by no means immune to the androcentrism we see in other areas of psychology, where men or masculinity are seen as central, normative, and “normal”. Moreover, our understanding of gender and its implications for behavior is still primarily based on an American or Western European perspective, as argued by both Grabe in Chapter 25 and Kurtiş and Adams in Chapter 16.

During the past 40 years we have also seen increasing complexity in the research methods available to us, both in the way in which data are collected and in the ways we analyze the information (see Eagly, Chapter 2). These include the examination of gender differences using new psychometric tests (see Guimond et al., Chapter 14; Barreto and Ellemers, Chapter 18) or expanding technologies to assess psychophysiological responses (see Fischer and Evers, Chapter 12; Matheson and Foster, Chapter 20) including fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). However, as argued by Fine, in Chapter 4, such innovations are not without their limitations.

Similarly, new analytic techniques have come to the fore, or become more accessible to psychologists. These include more complex approaches to testing for moderation and mediation, multi-level analysis, and structural equation modeling. Such analyses allow us to ask more complex questions and come up with more nuanced explanations for gendered phenomenon. For example, with an increasing number of psychological studies examining gender and gender differences (either explicitly or by default), new analytic means of synthesizing whole bodies of research, such as the development of meta-analysis, outlined by Eagly in Chapter 2, allow us to obtain a more integrated picture of what the literature does, or does not, tell us about gender and gender differences.

CHANGES IN THE QUESTIONS THAT WE ASK

Much social change has occurred over the past 40 years. As outlined above, there have been changes in the way in which we study the psychology of gender, but these changes have not occurred in a vacuum. During this time period, we have also experienced many societal shifts, especially in areas that are of relevance to gender researchers. These include the changing roles of women and men – especially the substantial increase of women in the full-time labor force, social movements such as third-wave feminism, and political and economic globalization. Together, these academic and social shifts have had a profound impact on our interests as researchers and have opened up a whole new array of research questions that we are able (and motivated) to ask.

Our research questions are clearly shaped by both the samples to which we have access and by the societal concerns that are salient at the time. For example, Maccoby and Jacklin’s (1974) focus on children and adolescents as their population of interest meant that examinations of cognitive ability focused on infant perception or school-related learning and memory tasks, as well as academic achievement and motivation. For the same reason, their examination of social behavior tended to focus on parent–child attachment, modeling, and play-activity. Similarly, while women tended to be underrepresented in psychological in the mid-20th century, those studies that did include women tended to concentrate on ‘women’s issues’, such as mothering or sexuality, often from a psychoanalytic theory perspective (Unger, 2001). However, it is not only the topic of study that is shaped by time and place, but also the interpretation of the findings obtained from the studies conducted. For example, Maccoby and Jacklin’s interpretation of gender differences was very much representative of the trend in the 1970s, spurred on by second-wave feminism, to minimize gender difference.

In contrast, gender researchers today cover a much broader array of research areas, as demonstrated by the diversity of topics covered in this Handbook. While ‘women’s issues’, such as sexual violence, are still of great interest to psychologists, they are often approached in very different ways, including the discursive approach outlined by Kurz and Donaghue (Chapter 5), the motivational approach taken by Maass and colleagues (Chapter 21), or methods of reducing gender-based violence described by Ball Cooper and colleagues (Chapter 22).

The research topics that we are drawn to are still, however, influenced by the context in which we, as investigators, are embedded. For example, as outlined by Barreto and Ellemers (Chapter 18), reductions in the acceptability of expressing overt sexism, together with the development of more subtle assessment techniques has led to a burgeoning area of research on subtle and benevolent sexism, while Jetten and colleagues (Chapter 19) describe the processes by which sexism and gender discrimination can be de-legitimized or legitimized depending on the norms operating in a given time and place. Similarly, an increasingly globalized world has led us to take a greater interest in the psychology of gender as it plays out in different cultural contexts (see Guimond and colleagues, Chapter 14), the psychological effects of context change via immigration (see Deaux and Greenwood, Chapter 15), and the role of physical attractiveness in marital relationships in different cultural settings (Kurtiş and Adams, Chapter 16).

Perhaps one of the greatest societal shifts that we have seen in relation to gender over the past 40 years is the changing role of women in relation to the family and the workplace. In many societies women have been entering higher education and the paid labor force in increasing numbers. In Western countries specifically, women are now equally represented in higher education and in the workplace more generally (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012). This shift in Western women’s participation in higher education and the workplace has prompted researchers to examine women’s performance once they get there. In particular, as Betz and colleagues discuss in Chapter 26, a large body of research examines the barriers to women’s performance in the form of stereotype threat, particularly in male-dominated areas. Western women’s greater participation in public life has also raised interest in understanding differences (and similarities) in the way in which women and men communicate (see Carli, Chapter 13) and in the way that they negotiate on behalf of themselves and others (see Bowles, Chapter 28). These authors dispel numerous myths concerning women’s deficits in these domains, and illustrate how subtle contextual factors can both produce and eliminate gender differences in performance.

Nevertheless, despite Western women having entered the workforce in greater numbers, there is a clear realization that many women are failing to reach the top. For example, while women make up 46.6% of the US workforce, they make up only 16% of company board members and less than 4% of CEOs (Catalyst, 2012). Similar statistics can be found in the United Kingdom (with only 15% female board members) and Australia (with only 8% female board members; Catalyst, 2012). Such statistics have given rise to a body of research, and a myriad of metaphors describing and explaining women’s underrepresentation (see Bruckmuller and colleagues, Chapter 27) and have prompted policy-makers and legislators to devise techniques to address inequality, such as affirmative action (see Crosby and colleagues, Chapter 29), and to reduce gender harassment (see Maass and colleagues, Chapter 21).

Over the past 40 years, psychology as a discipline has also experienced shifts and expansions in the research topics that are seen as relevant or popular. The growth in popularity of health psychology reflects renewed interest in the link between physical and psychological health, and the question of whether the relationship between physical health and well-being differs for women and men has been brought to the fore. This revitalized interest in the mind–body link has resulted in investigations concerning the role that gender plays in the onset of disease and maintenance of health, as exemplified by the discussion of mortality and women’s health risks by Goldenberg and colleagues (Chapter 24). Likewise, Grabe’s discussion of body objectification and the potential parallels between different forms of body modification found in the Western world (e.g., breast augmentation) and that found in Africa especially (e.g., genital mutilation) (Chapter 25) serves to remind us that gender and health need to be understood as embedded within existing cultural norms and practices.

In addition to new areas of study, this volume also showcases a range of theoretical frameworks from which gendered differences and similarities can be understood. For example, the development of the social identity approach (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987) provided a theoretical approach from which to examine gender in terms of identity processes and their implications for intergroup relations. For example, identity can be used to understand such diverse psychological issues as (a) the legitimization of discrimination (Jetten and colleagues, Chapter 19), (b) how individuals might cope with inequality and gender discrimination (Matheson and Foster, Chapter 20; and Morton, Chapter 23), (c) how social change comes about (Batalha and Reynolds, Chapter 11), and (d) the motivations underlying sexual harassment (Maass and colleagues, Chapter 21). Similarly, the development of terror management theory (e.g., Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) paved the way for a model of health that helps to explain when women seek or avoid medical tests, including breast examinations (Goldenberg and colleagues, Chapter 24). Social role theory too provides a general framework whereby role changes that occur as people age can be understood (Kemper, Chapter 10), when and why communication differences emerge (Carli, Chapter 13), whether emotional expressions vary as a function of social structural position (Fischer and Evers, Chapter 12), and how role shifts as a result of immigration (Deaux and Greenwood, Chapter 15) can affect identity and behavior.

NEW EXPLANATIONS AND NEW CONTROVERSIES

In their 1974 book, Maccoby and Jacklin argued that ‘before we can understand the “why” and “how” of psychological sex differentiation, we must have as accurate and detailed knowledge as possible concerning the nature of existing difference’ (p. 1). For this reason, they concentrated on documenting evidence for gender differences (and similarities) and exploring the magnitude of those differences. Such an approach can be considered a ‘main effects’ approach – that is, the goal is to demonstrate whether there is or is not a gender difference in ‘behavior X’. However, more recently our research questions have become more complex, both because of the progression of the literature and because of the sophistication of our statistical analyses. Thus, we now not only want to understand ‘what gender differences exist’, but we also want to understand the ‘why and how’ outlined by Maccoby and Jacklin. If we are to think of the description of gender differences as main effects, one useful way of conceptualizing the why and the how is through the distinction between mediation and moderation (Baron & Kenny, 1986). In this way, understanding ‘why’ gender differences occur can be addressed best through a mediational approach, where we try to identify the variables or the processes that underlie or account for such differences. For example, we can look to biological factors (Byrd-Craven and Geary, Chapter 7) or social stereotypes (Betz and colleagues, C...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• PART ONE HOW GENDER IS STUDIED
• PART TWO DEVELOPMENT
• PART THREE GENDER DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
• PART FOUR CONFLICT AND COPING
• PART FIVE GENDER AND SOCIAL ISSUES
• Author Index
• Subject Index