Essay On Gender And Gender

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When separating men and women according to gender, most people would do it based on physical appearance. Would you have ever thought that you can tell whether someone is man or woman according to psyche? Psychological gender differences have had a long history dating back for more than a century. The use psychological research on women began in 1879 which also marks the beginning of formal psychology. Any research done during these years was mostly used to the notion that the white male was supreme over everyone else. This belief is a gender stereotype and children develop their gender based beliefs on such things. I believe children should develop their gender based beliefs from studies that are unbiased and doesn’t favor one gender over another.
During the early years of psychological research, many believed the brain of a male and female was different as their physical appearance in selected areas. The most popular argument was that females had smaller heads and smaller brains than males that brain size was a direct indicator of intelligence and that women must therefore be less intelligent than men. (Hyde, 1990, p.56) The argument overlooked the fact that brain size correlates with the size of the body. Helen Thompson Woolley dismissed the argument on brain size stating, “It is now a generally accepted belief that the smaller gross weight of the female brain has no significance other than that of the smaller average size of the female.” (Hyde, 1990, p.57) During these years, you could only find a meager amount of research using actual psychological methods to determine gender differences.
The new phrase in research on gender differences was the use of mental testing and the creation of standardized ability tests. French p...

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...most competent and women tend be more helpful in situations that pose little danger and feel more competent in a nurturing role.
The way we conduct research and our findings over the past century have come a long way from the naïve beliefs about the mental abilities of women compared to men. Prior to the makings of meta-analysis, studies always concluded that there were no gender differences in general intelligence but favored the genders in certain abilities. With the use of meta-analysis, there were various amounts of conclusions that did show a small gender difference cognitive ability. Meta-analysis also helped Linn and Petersen discover that there were three distinctive spatial abilities: mental rotation, spatial perception, and spatial disembedding. Meta-analysis is a great tool to do an unbiased assessment on existing research on cognitive gender differences

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