Psyc 3331 Psychology of Gender Notes 02.02.05
Chapter 1 Key Terms
• Androcentric bias: discipline of psychology that is largely focused on men and describes men as superior and women as inferior.
• Bias in Research Methods: bias occurs in every part of the research process-from question formulation and research design to data analysis and interpretation
• Blatant sexism: occurs when women are treated in a transparently harmful and unequal way.
• Covert sexism: form of sexism that’s intentional, hidden, and often hostile.
• Cultural approach: origins of gender stereotyping from a sociocultural perspective where children are socialized to act according to their culture.
• Cultural feminism: emphasizes characteristics and qualities of women that are devolved and ignored in society.
• Division 35: APA’s division of the psychology of women (est.1973)
• Engendering psychology: a psychology which gender considerations are mainstreamed throughout the discipline.
• Evolutionary psychology: developed by Wilson; psychological traits are selected through evolution
• Feminism: belief that women and men are equal and should be equally valued and have equal rights.
• 1st wave feminism: began in 1903 with the founding of women’s social and political union
• gender: different between boys and girls and women and men are averaged in society’s social interact; based on a composed set of traits, interests, and behaviors.
• Gender schema: structures that allow a person to organize information related to gender by linking gender labels to objects, traits, and behaviors.
• Gender stereotypes: cognitive representation of males and females; organized set of beliefs of psychological traits and characteristics as well as activities appropriate to men or women.
• Liberal feminism: focuses on equality of women and men
• Men’s movement: includes military, political, religion, and economic events that have benefited men
• Radical feminism: focuses on control of women by men; based on belief that men’s oppression of women is primary and serves as a model for all other oppression
• Science: knowledge based activity that depends on facts accumulated through systematic and objective questioning, hypothesis testing, methodological study, analysis, and presentation.
• Sex: biological difference in the genetic composition and reproductive structures and functions of men and women
• Sex discrimination: harmful and unequal treatment of individuals due to their sex.
• Sexism: differential treatment of individuals based on their sex; subordination of women and assumption of the superiority of men solely on the basis of sex or gender
• Social constructionism: view by Foucault that human behavior determined by historical, cultural, and social conditions
• Socialist feminism: focuses on social relations and how social institutions preserve and promote male dominance.
• Sociobiology (Evolutionary Psychology): theory by Wilson that holds that psychological traits are selected through an evolutionary process; adaptive traits are selected because they serve to perpetuate the species.
Feminism is the advocacy of women’s rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes. In simple terms, it is the ideology of women being equal to men and it is often misinterpreted as the belief of women being above them. Feminists believe in diminishing patriarchy which is a system of society and or government in which men are considered more powerful than women. When people are against feminism they are supporting sexism which is why it is important to educate ourselves on the matter and to understand why we need it.
Personally, I do not know how should I think about feminism appropriately or what is the ideal way to think about this word. Since there are no significant differences between male and female, except physical aspects, the inequality between females and male has remained for several thousand years. it is necessary for human beings in contemporary society to think about this issue seriously because females have to voice for themselves and discriminations have to be eliminated progressively.
Society stereotypes women in almost all social situations, including in the family, media, and the workplace. Women are often regarded as being in, “Second place” behind men. However, these stereotypes are not typically met by the modern day woman....
The clusters of social definitions used to identify persons by gender are collectively known as “femininity” and “masculinity.” Masculine characteristics are used to identify persons as males, while feminine ones are used as signifiers for femaleness. People use femininity or masculinity to claim and communicate their membership in their assigned, or chosen, sex or gender. Others recognize our sex or gender more on the basis of these characteristics than on the basis of sex characteristics, which are usually largely covered by clothing in daily life.
The feminist perspective shines light on social problems, trends, and issues that are overlooked by the
Feminism is a perspective that views gender as one of the most important bases of the structure and organization of the social world. Feminists argue that in most known societies this structure has granted women lower status and value, more limited access to valuable resources, and less autonomy and opportunity to make choices over their lives than it has granted men. (Sapiro 441)
view holds that gender is not biologically based, but rather it is a cultural construct that is
The ideology that one sex is superior to the other is called sexism. The presumption of male sexism led to patterns of prejudice and discrimination against women. These prejudices and discriminations have led to many beliefs or ideas of why women are inferior to men. They range from brain size to sexual differences, including personalities based on genitalia. Cross-cultural studies demonstrate how the socialization process and societal expectations of men and women produce variances in sex-role norms and behavior.
Where Marxists are focused on production and the wage gap, Feminists are focused on gender inequality. Marxists see society as operating solely to make a profit for the bourgeoisie, with the proletariat forced to conform to the needs of a ruling class who benefit the most from using a capitalist economic system. On the other hand feminists see society as operating to meet the needs and wishes of men. Patriarchal societies are created in order to meet the desires and needs of men through institutions like the family and the education system. On this basis feminists say women become second-class citizens. According to Gayle Rubin, “there is no theory which accounts for the oppression of women- in its endless variety and monotonous similarity, cross-culturally and throughout history- with anything like the explanatory power of the Marxists theory.”(Rubin
Feminist political ideology focuses on understanding and changing political philosophies for the betterment of women. Studying how the philosophies are constructed and what makes them unjust, this field constantly generates new ideas on how these philosophies need to be fundamentally reconstructed. Liberal feminism, for example, was built around promoting economic and political equality for women. By arguing the older concepts of the split between public and private realms as a way to politically protect male domination of women as “natural”, and ideas about a women’s place in the household, came evidence that supported legal cases leading “to the criminalization in the United States of spousal rape” (qtd. in McAfee). Another completely different approach is radical feminism, which advocates a separation from the whole system, perceiving that the sexual relations between male and female as the basis of gender inequality and female subordination (qtd. in McAfee). Democratic femin...
Over the decades, a significant mark of the evolution of gender is the increasing social phenomenon in how society conceptualizes gender. Gender is a system of social practices for characterizing people as two different categories, femininity and masculinity and arranging social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference (Ridgeway & Correll 2004). Gender-neutral parenting (GNP) refers to raising children outside of the traditional stereotypes of girls and boys. It involves allowing children to explore their innate personalities and abilities rather than confining them into rigid gender roles that society has shaped. It can be argued that it is through socialization children discover how to operate in gendered structures, learn
What is within the boundaries of the feminine is always considered to have less status and power and is always subordinate and marginal—women always remain ‘other’. I perceive feminism as a part of the process of challenging the boundaries of the socially constructed role for women in our society—a process which through struggle will create for women a different notion of the normal and natural and a different tradition of being female. (Goodman, Harrop 4)
The first wave was in the year of 1789 which was organised to promote women’s rights by the first group of which included a wide range of women directly after the French revolution. The revolution had been fought in the 1970s on the basis of equality and freedom for women; as a result of this many women had then formed clubs mainly in Paris and also in major cities. The main principal for these clubs was to form a meeting place for women; as a result of these meetings it caused the development of political programmes regarding many issues such as rights in education. (Quidlen, 2001) First Wave Feminist activism grew out of abolitionism, thus leading to the rise of a suffragist movement in which was to ensure that slavery was put to an end if they received the right to vote. (Giddens,
Feminism’s definition is the movement for women’s rights in economic, political, and social standards to be equal to those of men’s. More concisely, it is the equality between women and men. The movement became a battle in small steps. Women’s suffrage in the early 20th century marks the initial drive to pave the way for a more vigorous movement. It started to prosper with the fight for women’s suffrage in the early 20th century and has not lost its vigor. Each small gain in the women’s rights movement became part of a greater struggle for equality. Yet, women are s...
Gender is the psychological characteristics and social categories that are created by human culture. Doing gender is the concept that humans express their gender when they interact with one another. Messages about how a male or female is supposed to act come from many different places. Schools, parents, and friends can influence a person. Another major factor that influences millions of impressionable females and males is television. Not only does the television teach each sex how to act, it also shows how one sex should expect the other sex to act. In the current television broadcasting, stereotypical behavior goes from programming for the very small to adult audiences. In this broadcasting range, females are portrayed as motherly, passive and innocent, sex objects, or they are overlooked completely or seen as unimportant entities.