Lecture 1/30/02
Psychological Perspectives on Gender Development
Gender identity refers to a “fundamental existential sense of one’s maleness or femaleness, an acceptance of one’s gender as a social psychological construction that parallels acceptance of one’s biological sex.” - Sense of maleness or femaleness.
Socialization is the process by which a society’s values and norms, including those pertaining to gender, are taught and learned.
Some of the theories that have been developed to explain how young children acquire their gender identities.
Research indicates that children as young as 18 months old show preferences for gender-stereotyped toys. By the age of two, they are aware of their own and others’ gender, and between two and three years of age, they begin to identify specific traits and behaviors in gender-stereotyped ways.
How do children come to adopt this information as part of their images of themselves and their understanding of the world around them?
Psychodynamic views of gender development - Object-Relations Theory or Identification Theory - relationships are central to the development of human personality and specifically, gender identity.
Identification Theory –Freud – Unconscious process -
During first two stages – oral and anal stages, boys and girls are fairly similar in their behavior and experiences. For both girls and boys, their mother is the chief object of their emotions since she is their primary caretaker and gratifies most of their needs.
Around age four, divergence. Children become aware both of their own genitals and of the fact that the genitals of boys and girls are different. – The Phallic stage –
It is during the phallic stage that identification takes place.
The boy’s identification is motivated by castration anxiety – he sexually desires his mother – sees his father as the rival (Oedipus complex). His desire is extinguished by the glimpse of the female genitalia, assuming that all girls have been castrated. Castration might befall him, therefore, represses his desires for mother. Boys perceive fathers as the castrators (since they have the size and the penis, so instead of competing, they become more like their father, ergo the boy gets to keep his penis and he can have a sexual relationship with his mother vicariously through father.
The boy achieves gender identity and sexual orientation at the same moment in time.
For girls , Freud believed that the path was complementary, but not nearly as traumatic. Girls retain their identification with mother, but must renounce their sexual desire for her.
In contrast – girl – penis envy. She witnesses the male’s “far superior equipment”, the little girl thinks she has been castrated. She becomes overwhelmed by her sense of incompleteness, her jealously of boys, and her disdain for her mother and all women since they share her “deformity.” Instead, she shifts her love to their father, who does possess the coveted penis and begins to identify with her mother as a means to win him. Eventually, the girl realizes that she can have a penis in two ways: briefly through intercourse and symbolically by having a baby, especially a baby boy. In other words, her wish for a penis leads her to love and desire men (initially in the person of her father), since they have a penis and can also provide a baby. However, a female never fully overcomes the feeling of inferiority and envy, which leave indelible marks on her personality:
According to Freud – narcissism, vanity, shame, … The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life.
Criticisms – can’t be verified since subjective –
Observer bias
Gendered behaviors as fixed and stable over time. Little room for personal or social change.
Antifemale bias. Females are defined as inadequate, jealous, passive, masochistic. Freud defined women as “an inferior departure from the male standard.”
Kimmel – Freud restates with new vigor traditional gender stereotypes as if they were the badges of successful negotiation of this perilous journey. A boy must be the sexual initiator, and scrupulously avoid all feminine behaviors, let he be seen as having failed it identify with father. A girl must become sexually passive, wait for a man to be attracted to her, so that she can be fulfilled as a woman. Femininity means fulfillment not as a lover, but as a mother.
Reinterpretations of Freud’s work:
Karen Horney, Erick Erikson, and Melanie Klein (60s –70s) – believed Freudian theory too phallocentric - Although each theorist continued to focus on how innate differences between the sexes influenced their respective psychological development.
Horney – promoted womb envy of men as opposed to penis envy
Erikson – since women have an inner space in which to carry and nurture new life – causes them to develop a psychological commitment to caring for others. In contrast, men’s reproductive organs are external and active, which in turn is reflected in the male psyche with its external focus and action orientation.
Clara Thompson, Jacques Lacan, Juliet Mitchell – “The penis is a symbol of male power in a patriarchal society.”
Nancy Chodorow
Mother-child relationship is thought to be the most fundamental influence on how an infant comes to define herself or himself
Internalizing others is not merely acquiring roles; instead, it creates the basic structure of the psyche - the core self.
We are all mothered by women -
For the mother and daughter there is a fundamental likeness, which encourages close identification between them. Mothers generally interact more with daughters and keep them physically and psychologically closer than sons. This intense closeness allows an infant girl to import her mother into herself in so basic a way that her mother becomes quite literally a part of her own self.
The fact that girls typically define their identity within a relationship may account for women’s typical attentiveness to relationships.
The relationship between a mother and son typically departs from that between mother and daughter. Because they do not share a sex, full identification is not possible. Theorists suggest that infant boys recognize in a primitive way that they differ from their mothers. More important, mothers realize the difference, and they reflect it in their interactions with their sons. In general, mothers encourage more and earlier independence in sons than in daughters, and they interact less closely with sons.
To establish his identity, a boy must differentiate himself from his mothers - declare himself unlike her. The idea that a boy must renounce his mother to establish masculine identity underlies the puberty rites in many cultures. She suggests that identification is more difficult for boys since they must psychologically separate from their mothers and model themselves after a parent who is largely absent from home, their fathers. Consequently boys become more emotionally detached and repressed than girls.
Independence becomes an essential component to selfhood and security.
Chodorow’s work has been criticized since it lacks supporting evidence. Chodorow says it is supported by clinical observations. Reliability?
It is criticized as ethnocentric. – Sexual division of labor in which only women care for infants is not present in all societies, yet children in all societies acquire gender, whatever its specific content.
Social learning theory
Based on behaviorism & notion of reinforcement: A behavior consistently followed by a reward will likely occur again, whereas a behavior followed by a punishment will rarely reoccur.
Social learning theory posits that children acquire their respective gender identities by being rewarded for gender-appropriate behavior and punished for gender-inappropriate behavior.
Moreover, children also learn through indirect reinforcement. They may learn about the consequences of certain behaviors just by observing the actions of others. (MODELING) - Children will be rewarded for imitating some behaviors and punished for imitating others. At the same time, children will most likely imitate those who positively reinforce their behavior. In fact social learning theorists maintain that children most often model themselves after adults whom they perceive to be warm, friendly and powerful (i.e. in control of resources or privileges that the child values). Girls are more likely to imitate male models than boys are to imitate female models, which may be because females are considered less powerful than males.
Behavior comes first, identity flows from the behavior.
Criticism of the theory – children are passive in their learning
Cognitive Development Theories – Theories of cognitive development locate the trigger of gender development and gender identity formation slightly later in life than early childhood. These psychologists argue that children are born more or less gender neutral, that is, no important biological differences between boys and girls at birth explain later gender differences. As they grow children process new information through “cognitive filters” that enable them to interpret information about gender. Children are active participants in their own socialization.
Work of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg
Unlike social learning theory, however, this approach assumes children play an active role in developing their own identities. Researchers claim that children use others to define themselves, because they are motivated by an internal desire to be competent, which includes knowing how to act feminine or masculine in Western culture.
According to cognitive developmental theorists, young children accomplish creating order out of disorder by looking for patterns in the physical and social world. Children have a natural predilection for pattern seeking; “once they discover those categories or regularities, they spontaneously construct a self and a set of social rules constant with them.”
The organizing categories that children develop are called schemas. Sex is a very useful schema for young children. Why sex? The answer lies in the second major principle of the cognitive developmental perspective: Children’s interpretations of their world are limited by their level of mental maturity.
Early on in their thinking children tend to be concrete; that is, they rely on simple and obvious cues. In our society (and most others), women and men look different. So sex is a relatively stable and easily differentiated category with a variety of obvious physical cues attached to it.
“I am a girl, therefore, I do girl things.”.
Developmentally at age 3, a child knows that they are a boy or girl. Gender identity comes first, and then behavior is organized around it. (different from social learning theory)
Cognitive developmental theory helps explain young children’s strong preferences for sex-typed toys and activities and for same-sex friends, as well as why they express rigidly stereotyped ideas about gender.
2 to 6 – preoperational stage – not yet capable of conserving variance, that is, they cannot understand that even if superficial aspects of an object change (the length of a man’s hair), the basic identity of the object remains unchanged (the person is still a man)
Studies indicate that as children get older and their cognitive systems mature, they appear to become more flexible with regard to the activities that males and females pursue, at least until they reach adolescence.
Critics – the age when children develop their own identities. As young as at 2 but cognitive developmental places it between 3 – 5 yrs.
In addition, recent research indicates that not everyone uses sex and gender as fundamental organizing categories or schemas; there are some individuals who may be considered gender “aschematic” although they themselves have developed gender identities.
Greater criticism – By portraying gender learning as something children basically do themselves, and by presenting the male-female dichotomy as having perceptual and emotional primacy for young children because it is natural and easily recognizable, cognitive developmental theorists downplay the critical role of culture in gender socialization.
We may agree that children actively seek to organize their social world, but that they use the concept of sex as a primary means for doing so probably has more to do with the gender-polarizing culture of the society in which they live than with their level of mental maturity.
Cultural/ Social Influences on Gender
Gender Schema Theory (Sandra Bem) once the child learns appropriate cultural definitions of gender, this becomes the key structure around which all other information is organized. This compatible with cognitive development theory in two major ways. First, a schema is a cognitive structure, which helps to interpret percents of the world, and second, before a schema can be formulated and gender-related information process appropriately, children must be at the cognitive level to accurately identify gender. When a girl learns that the cultural prescriptions for femininity include politeness and kindness, these are incorporated into her emerging gender schema, and she adjusts her behavior accordingly.
Bem begins with the observation that the culture of any society is composed of a set of hidden assumption about how the members of that society should look, think, feel, and act. These assumptions are embedded in cultural discourses, social institutions, and individual psyches, so that in generation after generation, specific patterns of thought, behavior are invisibly, but systematically reproduced. Bem calls these assumptions lenses.
There are 3 gender lenses
Gender Polarization – refers to the fact that not only are males and females in the society considered fundamentally different from one another, but also these differences constitute a central organizing principle for the social life of the society.
Androcentrism – refer to both the notion that males are superior to females, and to the persistent idea that males and the male experiences are the normative standard against which women are judged.
Biological Essentialism – the lens that serves to rationalize and legitimate the first two by portraying them as the natural and inevitable products of the inherent biological differences between the sexes.
Bem’s theory has both aspects of the social learning perspective as well as cognitive developmental perspective –
Gender socialization may be explicit – but Bem focuses on the metamessage –
Children are not passive receptors.
Children use social cues (e.g. hairstyle, clothing, rather than biological cues) in identifying gender (give example of Bem’s own son who wore barrettes to nursery school – other boy’s reactions).
The Social Psychology of Sex Roles – In their effort to understand the constellation of attitudes, traits, and behaviors that constituted appropriate gender identity, some social psychologists elaborated and extended original classification of the M-F scale offered by Terman and Miles. If masculinity and femininity could be understood as points on a continuum, a variety of abnormal behaviors could possibly be understood as examples of gender-inappropriate behavior.
Structural Functionalism - A second trajectory that coincided with these studies was the work of Talcott Parsons and other sociologists who sought to establish the societal necessity for masculinity and femininity. Parsons argued that society had two types of major functions – production and reproduction – and that these required two separate institutionalized systems, the occupational system and the kinship system, which, in turn, required two types of roles that needed to be filled in order for it function successfully. Instrumental roles demanded rationality, autonomy, and competitiveness; expressive roles required tenderness and nurturing so that the next generation could be socialized .
By the 1970s. sex role theory was challenged. Daryl and
Sandra Bem and others explored the content of sex roles and argued that the most psychologically well-adjusted and intelligent people were those who fell in between the polar oppositeness of masculinity and femininity. It was , they argued, androgyny, the combine presence of socially valued, stereotypic feminine and masculine characteristics that best described the healthy adjusted individual.
Joseph Pleck challenged the form of the sex role theory. Pluck advanced the idea that the problem was not that men were having a hard time fitting into a rational notion of masculinity but that the role itself was internally contradictory and inconsistent.
Kimmel – further problems. For one thing, when psychologists discussed the “male” sex role or the “female” sex role, they posited a single, monolithic entity, a ‘role” into which all boys and all girls were place. But all males and all females are not alike.
A second problem with sex role theory is that the separate categories into which males and females are sorted look similar to each other.
When we way that boys become masculine and girls become feminine in roughly similar ways, we posit a false equivalence between the two. If we ignore the power differential between the two categories, then both privilege and oppression disappear.
Construction of gender are relations – we understand what it means to be a man or woman in relation to the dominant models as well as to one and another. And those who are marginalized by race, class, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and the like also measure their gender identities against those of the dominant. Group.
Finally sex-role theory assumes that only individuals are gendered, that gendered individuals occupy gender-neutral positions and inhabit gender-neutral institutions. But gender is more than an attribute of individuals; gender organizes and constitutes the field in which those individuals move. The institutions of our lives – families, workplaces, schools- are themselves gendered institutions, organized to reproduce the differences and the inequalities between women and men.
Theories of sex roles and androgyny help us to move beyond strictly psychological analyses of gender. But the inability to theorized difference power, relationally and the institutional dimension of gender means that we will need to build other elements into the discussion. Sociological explanations of gender begin from these principles.
-Kay Deaux and Brenda Major
Social psychology considers the situational influences on human behavior as a defining characteristic assigning them a priority over individual traits and personality dispositions.
Their model is concerned with gender as experienced and enacted in a particular social context.
Gender-related behavior is marked by flexibility, fluidity, and variability.
A second assumption that underlies this model is that women and men make choices in their actions.
In contrast to both psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the framework presumes a repertoire of possibilities from which individual men and women choose different responses on varying occasions with varying degrees of self-consciousness.
Gerson and Peiss described gender as a set of socially constructed relationships that are produced and reproduced through people’s actions.
Social interaction can be viewed as a process of identity negotiation where individuals pursue particular goals for the interaction.
Deaux and Major’s ideas parrallel the sympbolic interactionist perspective in sociology, that is that the interaction requires that the participants in the interaction arrive at a “definition of the situation.” That participants make choices to control the presentation of themselves and that they may bring gender scripts to the interaction. However, the meaning of the interaction is fluid and created in the interaction. In this case, gender is created in the interaction.
Negotiated social interaction is dependent on two theoretical preconceives in social psychology.
Expectancy confirmation (sometimes called self-fulfilling prophecy) focuses the active role of observers in maintaining or creating society reality through cognitions or behaviors toward a particular individual. The process involves sequence in which individual takes actions on the basis of their beliefs, and these actions then influence the behaviors of their recipient, leading to a confirmation of the initial belief. We consider how the gender belief system of another can impact upon the individual woman, channeling her behavior in ways that support the stereotypic beliefs.
A second theoretical tradition concerns the facts that motivate an individual to vary how she presents herself to others.
On the one hand, concerns with self-verification may lead the person to emphasize those underlying beliefs and characteristics that define a stable self-identity. On the other, external pressures may encourage the choice of self-presentations strategies that increase the likelihood of positive reactions from another. In either case the persons shows a freedom of choice to select some facet of self from among a number of possible alternatives
The model that we are developing attempts to deal both with the Variations between people and with variation in a given individual across situations and tine.
Deaux and Major discuss those factors when gender shapes the interaction.
Three influences, first the individual woman or man, second the individuals with whom the person interacts, and third, the context or setting in which the interactions take place.
First – the individual
Gender identity refers to a “fundamental existential sense of one’s maleness or femaleness, an acceptance of one’s gender as a social psychological construction that parallels acceptance of one’s biological sex.” - Sense of maleness or femaleness.
Central component to our self. Services as an organizing principle through which many experiences and perceptions of self and other are filtered.
Although the concept of gender identity is universal, substantial individual differences or in the characteristics of these identities.
For example people differ in the degree to which gender is a salient aspect of their identity. Women more so than men. Chorodow’s findings are consistent with the argument that dominant groups have less need to be self-reflective than do groups who most define themselves vis-à-vis a more powerful other.
A second way to which gender identities differ among individuals concerns the particular features associated with those identities. Examples, feminine or feminist
The influence of gender on social interaction depends heavily on the degree to which associations with gender are invoked, either consciously or unconsciously.
The accessibility of gender identity – the degree to which concepts of gender are actively involved in a particular experience or are part of what has been called the “working self-concept.”
Accessibility is affected by at least two sets of factors: the strength or centrality of that aspect of the self and features of the immediate situation that make gender salient.
For some people gender will always be part of the working self-concept, and ever-present filter for experience. The saliency of gender can differ for the same individual across different situations and stages of life.
External cues can also evoke gender identity, moving it into the working self-concept. Example -Gender becomes important when you are a member of the minority.
Not always recognized in feminist analyses is the fact that people have identities other than gender. For example race, is an important identity.
Which identity is dominant in a situation in which both might be accessible depends on the individual (the relative prominence of a particular identity in some hierarchy of identities) and on the situation (the degree to which circumstances make particular identity salient). Gender is most likely to dominate interaction, by this account, when it is an identity of primary importance and when the situation contrives to make general relevant.
Awareness of gender does not automatically dictate action. Instead people choose how to present themselves to others, with the choices reflecting a variety of motivations. One line of psychological investigation has stressed the gender to which individuals act to verify self-concepts, choosing actions that will be consistent with previous definitions of self. An alternative perspective stresses the degree to which people are sensitive to the social significance of their conduct and strive to present themselves in ways that will ensure social rewards;. Concerns with self-verification and self-presentation may be interwoven in any social interaction.
2. The influence of others
Social interaction occurs in a context in which certain expectations are conveyed by participants toward each other. The individual is generally aware of what is expected, prescribed, or typical in that selling. These expectations can shape the interaction so as to constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy, People interact with each other may come to manifest the previously held beliefs of their companions. These beliefs , operating at various levels of specificity, serve as a framework or orientation for the individual approaching any particular interaction, and because information about physical appearance is both readily available and prominently coded stereotypic thinking may be triggered quite early in initial encounters.
Attributes they associate with gender categories. Some people are gender schematic – some are aschematic (Bem)
Deaux and Major do not believe that gender is always salient to the observer or that gender-related beliefs are necessarily activated in social interaction.
Specific features of a person’s appearance can trigger a subset of gender beliefs in the mind of the observer. (for example how they are dressed)
Predispositions in the observer may lower the threshold for seeing gender relevance or influence the way in which a particular behavior is interpreted. Men see more sexual content in the friendly behavior of a woman. The expectancy confirmation sequence describes processes linking beliefs to actions, including active avoidance or termination. An analysis of these beliefs is important because of their consequences.
Situation and Context –
The context in which an interaction takes place, like the characters of the action shapes the outcome. Context can be considered at many levels, from cultural norms and societal structures to the more immediate circumstances of an interaction.
Certain situations make gender more salient, increasing the likelihood that each of the participants will bring gender scripts to bear. Some environments such an s a nursery school or an automobile repair shop are closely linked to gender. Other situations make gender silent because of the particular participants, as Kanter’s analysis of principle.
To predict whether sex differences will be the rule or the exception, one must analyze the total set of influencing factors. The actual behavior of women and men in a situation depends on the relative weights of the three elements: the self-definitions and goals of each participant, the beliefs and expectation of the other and the context in which the interaction takes place.
If women and men bring similar experiences and self-conceptions to a situation, if they aspire to the same outcomes, and if they are acting in a context within which sex discrimination is minimal, relatively few differences should be observed.
Characteristics of the other’s expectancy that can be important include the desirability of the advocated behavior for the individual and the certainty with which that message is sent. Who is conveying the expectation also matters a great deal. A person is far more likely to confirm the expectations of those who are powerful, liable, and control rewards and outcomes than those whose resources are limited.
Confirmation of another person’s expectancies is more likely in public situations than private ones, and more common in novel situations than in familiar ones.
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