Gender, Communication, and Culture Research

Research on Gender, Communication, and Culture

• Gender research is conducted across multiple disciplines like anthropology, communication, history, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and women's studies.
• Researchers in these fields use various methods to study gender.

Quantitative Research Methods

• This involves gathering and analyzing data that can be quantified.
• Common methods include descriptive statistics, surveys, and experiments.
• Descriptive statistics are used to describe populations, proportions, and frequencies, e.g., how often men and women interrupt, or how much they earn in similar roles.
• Surveys collect data on feelings, thoughts, and experiences, e.g., preferred online activities.
• Experiments manipulate an independent variable to see how it affects a dependent variable, e.g., reading fashion magazines affecting women's self-esteem.

Qualitative Research Methods

• This focuses on understanding the nature or meaning of experiences that cannot be easily quantified.
• Textual analysis studies communication texts (written, oral, or nonverbal), e.g., analyzing speeches.
• Ethnography involves observing people to understand what things mean to them, providing insights into how gender is enacted.

Critical Research Methods

• This involves identifying and critiquing how power relations are created or challenged.
• It can reveal how organizational structures create unwelcoming environments.

Mixed Research Methods

• This combines quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches.

Gender in a Transitional Era

• Conflicting feelings exist about gender issues.
• There is the potential for disagreement on gender issues:
  • Both parents should participate in child rearing but assume the mother is the primary caregiver.
  • Support gender equality in the military but remain uncomfortable with women in combat roles.
  • Believe in equal opportunity, but colleges should offer more scholarships to male athletes.
  • Believe that gender is fluid but are taken aback when a close friend comes out as trans.
• Attitudes around gender are not always clear or consistent.

Differences between Women and Men

• There are both differences and similarities between sexes and genders.
• There is variance among individuals based on experience, heredity, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and economic class.
• Terms like "women" and "men" can be troublesome, grouping individuals into broad categories that can be inaccurate.

Essentializing

• The reduction of a phenomenon to its essential characteristics, which are generally presumed to be innate or unchangeable.
• Implies all those of a certain group are nearly identical.
• When sex is essentialized, we mistakenly assume all members of a sex share defining qualities.
• Essentializing ignores individual differences.

Relationships among Gender, Culture, and Communication

• Gender, culture, and communication are interconnected and should not be studied in isolation.
• Sex refers to biological and genetic characteristics (male, female, intersex) assigned at birth.
• Gender is socially constructed and expressed including:
  • Internal sense of self as a woman, man, both, or neither (gender identity).
  • External communication of gender identity through clothing, hairstyles, behavior, and voice (gender expression).
  • Cultural expectations assigned to one's sex (gender role).
• Sex and gender can be consistent, but for some, they do not neatly align.

Intersex People

• Intersex people are approximately 1% of the population.
• They are born with variations in genital, chromosomal, or hormonal traits.
• Guidelines have been adopted in some countries that allow parents to choose among more than two sex categories on birth certificates.
• There are growing movements to protect a person's bodily autonomy and self-determination.

Gender

• Gender is the social meaning assigned to sex.
• Gender is related to how one perceives and experiences gender (gender identity).
• Gender is related to how our individuality is communicated to the outside world (gender expression).
• Gender, gender identity, and gender expression are not innate and are more fluid than sex.
• Gender varies across cultures, time, individual lifespans, and in relation to others.
• Masculinity in the U.S. is associated with being strong, ambitious, successful, rational, and emotionally controlled.
• Femininity in the U.S. is associated with being physically attractive, emotionally expressive, nurturing, and concerned with relationships.
• Encouragement to embody the gender that society prescribes starts from infancy.

Gender Roles in Society

• Cultures stipulate the social meaning and expectations of each sex.
• Gender roles are challenged by those identifying as trans (transgender), nonbinary, genderqueer, or gender nonconforming.
• Gender roles change through role models.
• Androgyny is a combination of qualities that society considers both masculine and feminine.

Beyond Sex and Gender

• Western culture assumes a link between sex, gender, and sexuality.
• Cis describes the links when a person fits conventional social expectations of gender.
• Departures exist from mainstream culture prescriptions.
• Sexual orientation refers to preferences for romantic and sexual partners.
• Transgender people find that their sex and gender do not match their gender identity.

Culture

• Actions that reinforce cultural gender roles pervade daily existence.
• Cultural views are not necessarily natural, we can learn to notice and think critically about them.

Communication Levels

• All aspects of communication are interconnected and interact with one another.
• The largest system affecting communication is culture.
• All communication has a content and a relationship level of meaning.
• Content level of meaning is the literal meaning of communication.
• Relationship level of meaning expresses how a speaker sees the relationship between self and others.

Key Terms

• Androgyny: Combination of qualities that society considers both masculine and feminine
• Cis: Person consistent with society's views of the sex assigned to the person at birth
• Communication: A process in which meanings are created and reflected through interactions involving symbols
• Content Level of Meaning: The literal meaning of communication
• Critical Research Methods: Modes of study informed by political commitments to interrogating power dynamics
• Culture: Structures and practices through which a social order is produced and reproduced
• Essentializing: Reducing a phenomenon to its presumed innate characteristics
• Gender: A social, symbolic construction including internal identity, external communication, and cultural expectations
• Gender Expression: External communication of gender identity through clothing, hairstyles, behavior, etc