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Gender bias: full marks
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An essay outlining and evaluating gender bias in psychology, including examples. This sample essay is 16/16 A*.
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Betsy EdwardsDiscuss gender bias in psychological research. Refer to examples of alpha and beta bias in your
answer. (16 marks)
Gender bias refers to the interpretaton of men and women in psychological research and
theory in a way that may not represent the characteristcs of either one or both of these genders
accurately. Alpha bias theories exaggerate enduring and inevitable diferences between men and
women, and may represent either an enhancement or undervaluing of one gender compared with the
other. For example, Freud’s psychodynamic theory suggests that women are less morally advanced than
men, because they do not experience the Oedipus complex and therefore experience less identicaton
with their same-sex parent.
Beta biased theories tend to minimize diferences between men and women, either by ignoring
the diferences between the sexes, or by generalizing indings of a single-sex sample to the other
gender. For example, untl aylor’s research into the ‘tend and befriend’ response, it was assumed that
the stress response for both genders was the ight or ight response.
he term androcentrism re ects the historical male dominance of psychology which has led to
female issues being understudied or misrepresented. For example, female anger can be ‘medicalised’
and atributed to hormones whilst male anger can be seen as a legitmate response to challenging
situatons.
One issue with alpha biased research is that it can perpetuate gender stereotypes and social
norms. For example, Darwin’s theory of sexual selecton suggests that women are choosier when
selectng a partner, whereas men aim to copulate with as many partners as possible this creates the
idea that promiscuous behaviour in men is acceptable and almost praise-worthy, yet in women it is
irresponsible. However, in some instances, alpha bias has led to the asserton of female worth in cases
where it was previously ignored for example, Cornwell found that women are beter than men at
learning. his kind of research is strengthened by its potental ability to help reduce gender inequality –
i.e. it may lead to more women occupying executve positons – however for gender equality to be
plausible, previous alpha biased research of an androcentric nature must be challenged.
A critcism of gender research is that the methods used are ofen biased and produce invalid
conclusions. Eagly and Johnson claim that women show poorer performance in lab experiments
compared to men, but that these diferences are not re ected in real life this may mean that the two
genders appear diferent in psychological research when really they are not. On the other hand, it can
be argued that articial conditons show the true behaviours of women, and that women adopt male
behaviours in real life for more chance of success in society, making it difcult to assess the extent to
which bias has afected the conclusions of a study. o address this, researchers should use a range of
research methods and practce re exivity within writen reports. Furthermore, it is important that
publicaton bias within scientic ournals is reduced, because favoring the publicaton of studies that
demonstrate a gender diference over those that do not creates misleading exaggeratons of the
existence of gender diferences.
Word count: 193 + 302
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