HISTORY OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF Prepared by: Hajra Maryam

GENDER
1894-1936: SEX DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE
▪ The first period focused on the differences between men and women and was
marked by the publication of a book by Ellis (1894) entitled Man and Woman, which
called for a scientific approach.
▪ No consideration was yet given to personality traits or roles associated with sex.
▪ The primary goal of this era was to examine if (really, to establish that) men were
intellectually superior to women. To accomplish this goal, scientists turned to the
anatomy of the brain.
▪ Size of the human brain and body weight.
▪ Women were thought to be inferior in intelligence.
SPECIFIC AREA FOR THE INTELLECTUAL
FUNCTIONING
▪ The frontal cortex was first thought to control higher levels of mental functioning, and
men were observed to have larger frontal lobes than women.
▪ Thinking shifted to the parietal lobe as the seat of intellectual functioning.
▪ All this research came under sharp methodological criticism.
END OF 1894-1936 ERA
▪ The period ended with the seminal work of Sex and Personality published by Lewis
Terman and Catherine Cox Miles in 1936.
▪ They concluded there are no sex differences in intellect.
1936-1954: MASCULINITY-FEMININITY AS A
GLOBAL PERSONALITY TRAIT
▪ Shifted their focus from sex differences alone to consider the notion of gender roles.
▪ The construct of masculinity–femininity, or M/F was introduced during this period.
▪ Terman concluded that the real mental differences between men and women could
be captured by measuring masculinity and femininity.
▪ Researchers developed a 456-item instrument to measure M/F. It was called the
Attitude Interest Analysis Survey (AIAS; Terman & Miles, 1936) to disguise the true
purpose of the test. The AIAS was the first published M/F scale.
▪ The instrument was composed of seven subject areas: (1) word association, (2)
inkblot interpretation, (3) information, (4) emotional and ethical response, (5) interests
(likes and dislikes), (6) admired persons and opinions, and (7) introversion–
extroversion, which really measured superiority–subordination.
DEVELOPMENT OF MMPI
▪ There were no assumptions about the basis of these sex differences.
▪ A few years later, Hathaway and McKinley (1940) developed the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
▪ The most notable feature in the development of this scale is that the femininity items
were validated on 13 homosexuals.
▪ Homosexual men were compared to heterosexual male soldiers.
▪ In fact, feminine traits were considered to be a predisposing factor to homosexuality
in men.
▪ Women were not even involved in research to evaluate femininity.
PROBLEMS WITH MMPI
▪ Women were not involved in the conceptualization of the female gender role.
▪ Only 13 homosexual men were involved in the study, which is hardly sufficient to
validate an instrument even if they had been the appropriate population.
▪ The purpose of the tests might have been obvious, which could lead men and women
to give socially desirable rather than truthful responses.
▪ Thus several projective tests of M/F were developed, including one by Franck and
Rosen (1949). They developed a test that consisted of incomplete drawings.
PROJECTIVE TEST FOR M/F
▪ Franck and Rosen began with 60 stimuli, asked men and women to complete the
drawings, and found sex differences in the way that 36 of the 60 were completed.
▪ These 36 stimuli then comprised the test.
▪ Men were found to be more likely to close off the stimuli, make sharper edges.
▪ Women were found to leave a stimulus open, to make round or blunt edges.
▪ The content of the objects men and women drew also was found to differ: Men drew
nude women, skyscrapers, and dynamic objects, whereas women drew animals,
flowers, houses, and static objects.
▪ Franck and Rosen suggested their instrument measures acceptance of one’s gender
role rather than the degree of masculinity and femininity.
1954-1982: SEX TYPING & ANDROGYNY
▪ This period was marked by Eleanor Maccoby’s (1966) publication of The
Development of Sex Differences, which reviewed important theories of sex typing,
that is, how boys and girls developed sex-appropriate preferences, personality traits,
and behaviors.
▪ In addition, in 1973, Anne Constantinople published a major critique of the existing
M/F instruments. She questioned the use of sex differences as the basis for defining
masculinity and femininity; she also questioned whether M/F was really a
unidimensional construct that could be captured by a single bipolar scale.
INSTRUMENTAL VERSUS EXPRESSIVE DISTINCTION
▪ The instrumental leader focuses on getting the job done and the expressive leader
focuses on maintaining group harmony.
▪ Parsons and Bales (1955) extended the instrumental/expressive distinction to
gender. They saw a relation between superior power and instrumentality and a
relation between inferior power and expressivity.
▪ They believed the distinction between the husband role and the wife role was both
an instrumental/ expressive distinction as well as a superior/ inferior power
distinction.
▪ The instrumental orientation became linked to the male gender role and the
expressive orientation became linked to the female gender role.
INSTRUMENTS FOR GENDER ROLE
▪ Two instruments were developed during this period that linked the instrumental
versus expressive orientation to gender roles.
▪ In 1974, Sandra Bem published the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and Spence,
Helmreich, and Stapp published the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ). The
BSRI and the PAQ are still the most commonly used inventories to measure masculinity
and femininity today.
▪ The innovative feature of both these scales was that masculinity and femininity were
no longer viewed as opposites.
BSRI
▪ The BSRI (Bem, 1974) was developed by having undergraduates rate how desirable
it is for a man and a woman to possess each of 400 attributes.
▪Items were based on respondents’ views of how desirable it is for men and women to
have these traits.
▪ The final BSRI consisted of 60 items: 20 masculine, 20 feminine, and 20 neutral items.
The neutral items are included in the instrument to disguise the purpose of the scale.
PAQ
▪ The PAQ was developed by focusing on the perception of how likely men and
women are to possess certain traits.
▪ College students were asked to rate the typical adult male and female, the typical
college male and female, and the ideal male and female.
▪ The masculinity scale included items that students viewed as more characteristic of
men than women but also as ideal for both men and women to possess. For example,
Independence.
▪ The femininity scale included items that were more characteristic of women than men
but viewed as ideal in both women and men. For example, Understanding of others.
M/F SCALE
▪ Spence and colleagues (1974) also created a third scale, called the M/F scale, that
was bipolar.
▪ These were items on which college students believed the typical college male and
the typical college female differed, but they also were items that students viewed as
socially desirable for one sex to possess but not the other. For example, the typical
college male was viewed as worldly, whereas the typical college female was viewed
as home oriented.
M & F: INDEPENDENT DIMENSIONS
▪ Scores on the masculinity and femininity scales are generally uncorrelated, reflecting
the fact that they are two independent dimensions.
▪ Men scored higher than women on the masculinity scales, and women scored higher
than men on the femininity scales.
▪ But the scales were developed 35 years ago. Do sex differences still appear today?
▪ People still have different views of what is desirable in a woman and in a man.
▪ However, women’s masculinity scores have increased over time, which has reduced
the size of that sex difference.
PERCEPTION & CHANGE IN M/F CHARACTERISTICS
▪ People view masculine characteristics as more desirable in women today than they
did in 1972.
▪ People’s views of what is desirable in men have not changed. These findings reflect
the greater changes in the female than the male gender role over the past several
decades.
▪ There has been more encouragement for women to become agentic than for men to
become communal.
IMPLICIT MEASURE FOR M/F
▪ Reports of femininity and masculinity could be influenced by demand characteristics,
implicit measures of masculinity and femininity have been developed, the most
popular of which is the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald & Farnham, 2000).
▪ The IAT is based on reaction times. Individuals see a series of agentic and communal
attributes flashed on a screen.
▪ The measure correlates with self-report measures of agency and communion and
reveals larger sex differences, perhaps because the implicit measure reduces
demand characteristics.
▪ To date, it is not known whether these measures predict behavior.
CONSTRUCT OF ANDROGYNY

▪ One outgrowth of these two M/F inventories (the BSRI and the PAQ) was
conceptualizing and researching androgyny.
▪ Androgyny emerged from the operationalization of masculinity and femininity as
unipolar, independent dimensions.
MEASUREMENT OF ANDOGYNY, SEX-TYPING &
CROSS SEX TYPING
▪ Androgyny was first measured with the BSRI by subtracting the masculinity score
from the femininity score.
▪ Positive difference scores reflected femininity, and negative difference scores
reflected masculinity.
▪ Scores near zero reflected androgyny, signifying that people had a relatively equal
amount of both traits.
CRITICISM: MEASURING ANDROGYNY
One problem with this measurement of androgyny is that the score did not distinguish
between people who endorsed many masculine and feminine qualities from people
who endorsed only a few masculine and feminine qualities.
ALTERNATIVE SYSTEM FOR SCORING ANDROGYNY
▪ They divided scores on masculinity and femininity scales in half to create the four
groups.

▪ A male scored masculine and a female scored feminine was referred to as sex-
typed. A masculine female and a feminine male were referred to as cross-sex-typed.
▪ To this day, most researchers still do not know the meaning of the “undifferentiated”
category.
ANDROGYNY IS AN IDEAL
▪ Androgyny was put forth by Bem (1974, 1975) as an ideal that embodies the
socially desirable features of both masculinity and femininity.
▪ It was no longer believed the most psychologically healthy people were masculine
men and feminine women.
▪ Androgynous people were supposed to have the best of both worlds. But subsequent
research revealed that the masculinity scale alone predicts behavioral flexibility and
psychological adjustment as well as, and sometimes better than, the androgyny score.
▪ Bem actually conceptualized androgyny to be much more than the sum of masculine
and feminine traits. Androgyny had implications for how one thought about the world.
UNDESIRABLE ASPECTS OF MASCULINITY AND
FEMININITY
▪ Spence and colleagues were looking to develop scales that measured socially
undesirable aspects of agentic and communal orientations.
▪ Spence and colleagues turned to the work of David Bakan.
▪ Bakan argued there are two principles of human existence: an agentic one that
focuses on the self and separation (male principle), and a communal one that focuses
on others and connection (female principle).
AGENCY: MITIGATED BY COMMUNION
▪ Bakan argued that it is important for the agency to be mitigated by communion and
that unmitigated agency would be destructive to the self and society.
▪ Drawing on this work, Spence and colleagues (1979) developed a negative
masculinity scale that reflected unmitigated agency; the scale included in the
Extended Personal Attributes Questionnaire (EPAQ).
▪ It conceptually reflects the construct of unmitigated agency: a focus on the self to the
exclusion of others.
▪ The scale is positively correlated with the M+ scale, reflecting the focus on the self,
and negatively correlated with the F+ scale, reflecting the absence of a focus on
others.
COMMUNION: MITIGATED BY THE AGENCY
▪ Spence and colleagues (1979) also wanted to capture socially undesirable aspects
of the female gender role.
▪ Turning to Bakan (1966) again, they noted that communion also ought to be
mitigated by the agency. Although Bakan never used the term unmitigated
communion, he noted it would be unhealthy to focus on others to the exclusion of the
self.
▪ Spence and colleagues had more difficulty coming up with traits that conceptually
reflected unmitigated communion. They developed two negative femininity scales, but
neither conceptually captured the construct of unmitigated communion (Spence et al.,
1979).
▪ Later, Helgeson (1993) developed an unmitigated communion scale. It has two
components: overinvolvement with others and neglect of the self. It is positively
correlated with F+, and negatively correlated with M+.
Both unmitigated communion and unmitigated agency have been shown to be
important constructs in the area of gender and health and account for a number of
sex differences in health.
1982-PRESENT: GENDER AS A SOCIAL CATEGORY
▪ There have been two recent trends.
▪ The first has been to view gender as a multifaceted or multidimensional construct,
meaning that the two-dimensional view of masculinity and femininity is not sufficient
to capture gender roles.
▪ The development of the unmitigated agency and unmitigated communion scales was
a first step in this direction.
▪ The second research direction has been to emphasize the social context in which
gender occurs. The research on gender diagnosticity addresses this issue.
▪ Emphasis on the social context led to research on gender-role constraints, the
difficulties people face due to the limits a society places on gender-role-appropriate
behavior.
GENDER ROLE AS MULTIFACETED
▪ In 1985, Spence and Sawin called for the renaming of the PAQ masculinity and
femininity scales. They argued that masculinity and femininity are multidimensional
constructs that cannot be captured by a single trait instrument.
▪ Researchers began to realize that lay conceptions of masculinity and femininity
included more diverse content, such as physical characteristics and role behaviors, in
addition to personality traits.
▪ The features of masculinity and femininity fell into one of three categories:
personality traits, interests, or physical appearance. The average person identified
five personality traits, two interests, and three physical appearance features for each
target.
SOCIAL CONTEXT SURROUNDING GENDER
▪ Social psychologists, in particular Kay Deaux and Brenda Major (1987), examined
gender as a social category by emphasizing the situational forces that influence
whether sex differences in behavior are observed.
▪ Another approach has been the movement by the social constructionists, who argue
that gender does not reside inside a person but resides in our interactions with
people.
GENDER ROLE STRAIN
▪ A phenomenon that occurs when gender-role expectations have negative
consequences for the individual.
▪ Self-role discrepancy theory suggests that strain arises when you fail to live up to
the gender role that society has constructed.
▪ Socialized dysfunctional characteristic theory states that strain arises because the
gender roles that society instills contain inherently dysfunctional personality
characteristics.
▪ Gender-role strain among men includes competitiveness, emotional inhibition,
aggression, and a reluctance to seek help.
▪ Gender-role strain among women, less studied, includes fear of physical
unattractiveness, fear of victimization difficulties with assertion, and uncertainty about
how to behave in traditionally masculine settings.
▪ The nature of gender-role strain differs across race, ethnicity, and culture.
REFERENCE
Helgeson, V. S. (2012). The Psychology of Gender (4th ed.). Pearson Education.