The Psychology of Gender

Gary W. Wood

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351718691
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psychologie
• Categoria: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

What is the difference between sex and gender? What is the impact of gender-role stereotypes on our lives, our relationships and the world? What does gender mean to you?

The Psychology of Gender looks at our biology, history and culture to consider the impact of gender roles and stereotypes, and addresses the 'dilemmas' we have regarding gender in a post-modern world. It offers a unique perspective on gender through storytelling and explores ideas around transgender and cisgender identities and androgyny, tackling hidden assumptions and helping us make sense of the world of gender.

By examining the future of gender, The Psychology of Gender offers a platform for further exploration, and arrives at a new psychology of gender that emphasises relationships and helps us to understand our own gender identity and that of those around us.

1

Introduction

Welcome to The Psychology of Gender in which we explore the implications of our classification, at birth, of ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ and how it impacts on all aspects of our lives.

Conventional wisdom about gender

We hear people say, in times of extreme stress or near-death experiences, ‘my whole life flashed before me’. However, what if, in a moment of precognition, our lives did flash before us at our very first breath? What if all the twists and turns, the patterns and choices were pre-determined? What if one flick of the pen mapped out our whole lives, based on a cursory glance of our infant nakedness? What if the ‘lottery of our anatomy’ was our destiny and biology and physiology determined our psychology? It sounds like a sinister plot from a dystopian science fiction novel.¹ And yet, every day, from every tick on a form we make to every bathroom break we take, we confirm and reconfirm our birth identities in pretty much this way: from girls and boys, to males and females, to ladies and gentlemen.

The Psychology of Gender is a short volume in The Psychology of Everything series offering a critical introduction aiming to bridge the gaps between everyday understanding, pop-psychology and academic writing. Everyday understanding harbours many taken-for-granted assumptions, and pop-psychology, with its comedic metaphors, aims to soothe and simplify – obscuring more than it illuminates. Although academia aims to shine a light on the unexplored, it sometimes over-intellectualizes so that it feels divorced from everyday reality. Sociologist Ken Plummer describes gender as ‘the surest of all ideas in the modern world and at the same time one of the most contested concepts in the social sciences’.² This book aims to tackle the key hidden assumptions surrounding gender, answer some questions, stimulate your own questions and guide further exploration.

Gender ‘hides in plain sight’. Psychologist Vivien Burr describes it as ‘the backcloth against which our daily lives are played out’.³ Gender is the ‘arena in which we face hard practical issues about justice, identity and even survival’.⁴ However, it is often treated as little more than ‘an interesting personality trait’. From my experience of teaching research methods, students routinely include ‘gender differences’ in their projects without questioning if it makes sense. Pop-psychology upholds this view, by encouraging us to think of men and women as so different that they are from different planets. Academic psychology has been slow to challenge this, as social psychologist Mary Crawford contends that the Mars/Venus books and workshops gained legitimacy through advertising in academic journals.⁵ Throughout the 1990s LGBTQ⁶ writers increasingly challenged the ‘taken-for-grantedness’ of gender. In The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender,⁷ Martine Rothblatt compares the challenges to the binary gender paradigm with heretical challenges to the earth-centred paradigm of the universe.

Before we continue, think about the last time you completed an official form. Declarations of sex or gender on such forms traditionally offered two options:

• Are you male?
• Are you female?

It never occurred to many people that it could be anything other than ‘either/or’. Then one day the forms changed, offering options such as ‘other’ and ‘prefer not to say’. Some would decry these changes as an assault on the ‘natural order’ or ‘political correctness gone mad’. Why would anyone prefer not to say? What else could there be beyond male and female? Others welcomed the opportunity of alternatives to the binary gender labels that better captured the reality of their lives. The Psychology of Gender aims to address these issues and more besides. Once you dare to question gender, the questions write themselves.

Why are the ‘helpers’ in artificial intelligence (AI) applications feminized (e.g. Siri, Cortana) when they do not need to be? Why are sports not organized by body size instead of gender? Are gender stereotypes bad for our health? Are gender roles a benign way of organizing the world? What is the connection between gender, power and inequality? Do self-help books offer the solutions to take us forward or sticking plasters for the status quo? Are gender differences hardwired in the brain? Is there more to you than pink or blue? Can we exist in a world without gender, or is resistance futile?

So where do we begin?

In academic psychology, it is a convention to start by clarifying the terms of the debate – brief, working definitions, so we are all, so to speak, on the same page. What is psychology? What is gender? What’s the connection between sex and gender?

What is psychology?

The accepted definition of psychology is ‘the scientific study of mind and behaviour’.⁸ It adopts scientific methods (like the natural sciences) to explore, in a systematic way, what it means to be human and what makes us tick. Methods include controlled experiments, observations, surveys and so on. The aim is to generate data, in the form of numbers (quantitative) or words and pictures (qualitative) or a combination. Researchers in psychology analyze these data to test research questions, generate explanations, develop and refine theories, generalize and make predictions of future behaviours. Psychology offers a means to test the assumptions of everyday understanding (and pop-psychology). Sometimes it confirms ‘common sense’, and at other times it offers a radically different view.

Psychology is not infallible, as research can never be conducted in a ‘values vacuum’. It is vulnerable to errors and biases that inevitably creep in when people study people.⁹ Psychology is a work in progress, and part of its project is to make visible the invisible and expose human bias in ever increasing approximations to ‘the truth’. It offers an alternative to the phrase that irked many an inquisitive child at school: ‘because that’s just the way things are’.

As a personal and professional development coach, I use the principle with clients that ‘the viewing influences the doing, and vice versa’. How we view the world influences what we do in the world. Sex and gender, as fundamental units of identity, create lenses (or filters) through which we interact with the world, influencing how we think, how we behave and experience the world and ourselves as part of it.

What is gender (and How does it relate to sex)?

Sex and gender are often used interchangeably, giving the impression that they are different words for expressing the same thing. In everyday language, some use gender as though it is a more polite alternative to saying ‘sex’, rather like using euphemisms for ‘toilet’, such as restroom, powder room, little boys’ room and the loo. Sex and gender are interrelated, but they are not synonymous. The tendency to blend and blur the terms can colour our thinking and obscure the fundamental differences. It makes it easier for us to assume that gender is a natural and inevitable product of our biology when it isn’t.

Sex has two meanings: a physical activity or a biological status. The act of having (or doing) sex is to engage in physical/genital intimacy with another person or persons, or of any self-stimulation, and not excluding inanimate objects.¹⁰ Sex as part of our identity – a state of being – is usually allocated at birth, primarily based on the appearance of our genitals. Mainly, it is an either/or binary classification of boy or girl which appears on our birth certificates. This sets in motion a series of expectations for the rest of our lives – that is, our gender.¹¹

Gender is the sociocultural (and psychological) interpretation of our biological sex, that is, how we make sense of the biology in everyday life. Whereas ‘male’ and ‘female’ are biological distinctions, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are gender distinctions. According to the hard-line view, masculinity results from maleness and femininity results from femaleness. This book aims to explore the grey areas, beyond this broad assumption, including whether sex and gender can be ‘divorced’ from one another. To begin questioning this, it helps to think of sex as a noun (something we are) and gender as the verb (something we do).

What to expect from this book

The Psychology of Gender draws on a wealth of theories and evidence from a broad review of disciplines to consider the impact of gender on our individual and collective psychologies, including our relationships and society in general. This short book cannot possibly offer an exhaustive examination, but rather highlights key themes and issues to offer a springboard for further critical reading. Gender is found in biology, sociology, physiology, social geography, queer theory, LGBTQI+ writing, feminist writing, cognitive neuroscience, cultural studies and so on. All inform and impact on our psychology. I also draw on my own research, which explains homophobia in terms of gender-role transgression, making explicit the link between homophobia and sexism. By a critical examination of the evidence, hopefully, we can arrive at a new psychology of gender, one that is less prescriptive and more meaningfully descriptive. One that draws parallels between future models of gender and models from cross-cultural and historical perspectives. One that considers the psychological complexity of the human experience.

• Chapter 2 considers the distinctions between sex and gender in greater depth, discusses gender roles and their relationship to our anatomy and how neither biological sex nor socialized gender is necessarily binary. It also considers the links between gender identity and having (or doing) sex.
• What does the research say about biological sex differences and ‘gendered brains’, their links to gender-role stereotypes and how they are interpreted and reported in pop-psychology circles? Chapter 3 takes a more in-depth look at the basis of perceived differences in gender.
• Are gender roles a benign way of organizing the world? The ‘equal but different’ view of gender often ignores the power relations (and inequalities). Chapter 4 considers the impact of enforcing gender-role stereotypes, including the individual psychological and health implications, the impact on friendships, relationships and society.
• Chapter 5 considers alternative stories for making sense of gender, other than the modern-day Western binary perspective that inhabits pop-psychology books. It considers where the story started and other world views as well as fairy tales, science fiction and cyber identities to help us begin to formulate a new blueprint for the psychology of gender.

Our journey through the psychology of gender concludes by drawing together the main themes and asking you to consider how the information impacts on you. What has struck a chord with you or struck fear into your heart? How will you make sense of it in relation to your understanding of yourself? How would you describe a gender that is meaningful to your life? What’s your story?

So, let’s begin by going back to basics and exploring the links between sex and gender.

2

Sex and gender

Two roads?

Debates around gender invariably centre on the assumed ‘naturalness’ of gender roles, that they are ‘hardwired’ and an inevitable result of our biology – that is, penises lead to masculinity and vaginas lead to femininity. This leads us to think of the body as ‘a kind of machine that manufactures gender difference’.¹ From this perspective, the road is well travelled, and the route is predestined. In contrast, Judith Butler in Gender Trouble describes gender as a practice, as something we do. It is ‘the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being’.² On this view, it is about performance rather than essence, with ‘the body as a kind of canvas on which culture paints images of gender’.³ It ‘boils down’ to the age-old nature versus nurture debate with which every psychology student must wrangle.

Building on the basic definitions offered in the introduction, this chapter first goes back to basics to review biological sex and the extent to which everything ‘lines up’. Is there a coherent binary narrative or ‘shades of grey’ and ambiguity? In developing the definition of gender, it introduces the idea that we interpret sex and gender through a set of lenses. The chapter also discusses intersex, transgender and cisgender and, finally, considers the relationship between gender and sexuality (sexual orientation).

The lenses of gender

In the 1990s, to unearth the hidden assumptions about gender differences, psychologist Sandra Bem proposed three lenses with which we view gender: biological essentialism, androcentrism, and gender polarization.⁴ These offer a...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sex and gender
• 3 Gender stereotypes and sex differences
• 4 The impact of gender-role stereotypes
• 5 Gender stories, backwards, forwards and sideways
• 6 Conclusions: moving forward – meaningful gender
• Further reading
• Notes