Gender in Psychology

Lecture Aims

• Why study gender in psychology?
• What does psychology say about gender?
• What are the problems with the psychology's position on gender?
• Why does psychology persist with problematic views about gender?
• How has psychology been challenged regarding its position on gender?

Why Study Gender in Psychology?

• Tamara Shefer's Psychology and Regulation of Gender (2013) highlights why gender is a vital consideration in psychology.
• Studies, like Shefer's expose the reproduction of gender inequality within psychology.
• Examines how and by whom knowledge is produced.
• White, male psychologists disproportionately dominate knowledge production in the field.
• This domination leads to the exclusion of female and Black psychologists during knowledge production.
• Psychology may promote unequal gendered practices within institutional and organizational structures, such as academia.

What Psychology Says About Gender

• Psychology often reproduces a "gender-as-difference" discourse.
• The commonly held belief is that gender is about fundamental differences between men and women.
• Men and women are often set up to be in opposition to one another.
• The differences between men and woman are understood as unchangeable or immutable and natural.
• The "gender-as-difference" discourse causes confusion between sex and gender.
• Sex constitutes biological or anatomical markers distinguishing male from female bodies.
• Gender encompasses social and cultural roles/practices distinguishing man from woman.

How Psychology Reproduces Gender-As-Difference

• Two ways psychology reproduces a gender-as-difference discourse are:
• Essentialism is the belief that a real, true, and authentic property of a given entity can be found.
• A unitary sexual character describes the way gender is treated as a collection of traits corresponding to biological sex.
• Psychology essentializes gender differences by describing men and women as psychological states residing deep inside people in a pure form that can be accessed.
• Psychology relies on a unitary sexual character to conceptualize gender.
• Gender becomes confined to a singular sexual characteristic where male = man and female = woman.
• Essentialism and the unitary sexual character tie sex to gender.

Problems with Gender-as-Difference

• Gender is often set up as a binary system.
• This binary system prohibits a fluid and open-ended view of gender identity.
• It limits the range of what it means to be masculine and feminine.
• The binary system covertly justifies and reinforces opposite-sex attraction as the norm.
• The system silences, others, and marginalizes sexualities outside cis-heteronormativity.
• The social and cultural contexts that produce masculinity and femininity are neglected.
• Offensive and negative gendered stereotypes are perpetuated.
• Long-standing histories of unequal gendered power relations are disregarded.
• An androcentric view of psychology is endorsed.

Why the Gender-as-Difference Discourse Persists

• Essentialism romanticizes gender. Romanticizing happens by relying on cultural ideals of what it means to be a woman and a man.
• Culturally valued masculine and feminine ideals are recycled and rehashed, especially through popular culture such as music, film, social media, and fashion.

Challenging Gender-as-Difference in Psychology

• Poststructural Feminism states gender is socially constructed.
• Gender is constructed through social practices/activities that people do everyday.
• Gender is constantly reinterpreted, reimagined, reworked, resisted, and reinforced.
• Gender identity becomes a site of constant struggle and negotiation.
• Gender is negotiated through the repetition of socially appropriate, desirable, and acceptable masculine and feminine behaviors.
• Judith Butler (1990) claims performance of gender occurs through a stylized repetition of actions.
• Gender is a performance achieved through the repetition of bodily gestures, enactments, movements, and forms of dress.