Gender Bias

Question 1

What is gender bias?

Answer 1

1. Preference towards one gender,
2. Can exaggerate or minimise differences between males and females.

Question 2

What is alpha bias?

Answer 2

1. Where differences between males and females are exaggerated.
2. This type of bias can be used to undervalue one of the sexes,
3. The differences are sometimes attributed to differences in biology - for example, differences in genetics or hormones.

Question 3

What is beta bias?

Answer 3

1. Beta bias is where differences between males and females are ignored or minimised,
2. This can happen when studies just include participants of one gender but then the conclusions are applied to the whole population.

Question 4

What is androcentrism?

Answer 4

1. Where males are viewed as being the centre of culture,
2. In psychological terms, male behaviour is seem as the norm. This can mean that theories made in relation to males are also applied to women, or it can mean that any differences that women display are seen as exceptions to the rule.

Question 5

What is estrocentrism?

Answer 5

1. This is where female behaviour is seen as the norm,
2. Much rarer than androcentrism.

Question 6

How can aims in research design avoid gender bias?

Answer 6

1. Psychologists need to be careful that they are not unconsciously including any gender stereotypes,
2. For example, studies on aggression often use male stereotypes to provide a measure of what it means to be aggressive.

Question 7

How can sampling in research design avoid gender bias?

Answer 7

1. Participants for research should be selected in a non-biased way,
2. I.e. early psychological research used only male university students; this could have had the effect of producing beta biased theories.

Question 8

How can methodology in research design avoid gender bias?

Answer 8

1. Researchers can sometimes unconsciously treat male and female participants differently during a study,
2. To avoid this, they should make sure that male and female participants are spoken to in the same manner,
3. If participants are treated differently, the researchers will be introducing extraneous variables that may produce a false gender difference in the results that isn’t actually there.

Question 9

How can hypotheses in research design avoid gender bias?

Answer 9

1. Should be aware that gender stereotypes can affect expectations about the outcomes of research,
2. These expectations can affect the results that they record, or the way that they interpret their results.

Question 10

How can publication cause gender bias?

Answer 10

1. Gender bias can be a result of publication bias,
2. It has been reported that studies that produced positive findings are more likely to be published than studies that don’t find any differences. In terms of gender research, this would mean that studies showing a difference between males and females would be more likely to appear in scientific journals than ones with no gender differences,
3. This can exaggerate differences between maels and females, and so produce an alpha bias.

Question 11

What theories show gender bias?

Answer 11

1. Freud’s theories,
2. Asch’s theory,
3. Bem’s theory.

Question 12

How does Freud’s theories show gender bias?

Answer 12

1. Usually described male behaviour as the norm, explaining female behaviour as anything which differed from the norm,
2. For eample, Freud proposed that when girls find out that they don’t have a penis, they suffer from the so termed ‘penis envy’.

Question 13

How does Asch’s theory show gender bias?

Answer 13

1. Asch’s research into conformity was androcentric - he used male-only sample, meaning that his results couldn’t be generalised to women.

Question 14

How does Bem’s theory show gender bias?

Answer 14

1. Bem’s (1974) theory of psychological androgyny is a beta-biased theory. Her theory centres on the idea that the most psychologically healthy men and women can choose which personality traits they want to have, regardless of whether they are typically masculine or feminine qualities,
2. In other words, she classed the various masculine and feminine traits as all being on a level playing field. This is why the theory is beta-biased. It ignores the fact that different traits are valued differently in society.