The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender: From Gender Differences to Doing Gender – Savvy Essay Writers | savvyessaywriters.net
The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender: From Gender Differences to Doing Gender – Savvy Essay Writers | savvyessaywriters.net
Special Anniversary Section
The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender: From Gender Differences to Doing Gender
Stephanie A. Shields1 and Elaine C. Dicicco1
The social psychology of gender is a major, if qualified,
success story of contemporary feminist psychology. The
breadth and intellectual vigor of the field is reflected in the
following six commentaries in the broadly defined area of
the Social Psychology of Gender which were commissioned
for this third of four 35th anniversary sections to feature brief
retrospectives by authors of highly cited PWQ articles.
Our goal in this section’s introduction is to provide a brief
history of the development of this area, placing the articles
described in the commentaries into this historical context.
The six articles in this special section, individually and taken
together, identify significant turning points in the social psy-
chology of gender. We focus on how, within a few brief
years, the study of gender in psychology underwent massive
transformation.1
The social psychology of gender has grown to become a
thriving, scientifically sound research theme that encom-
passes a wide variety of topics and questions. The story of
how this came to be has been told from a number of perspec-
tives (e.g., Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Deaux, 1999;
Rutherford, Vaughn-Blount, & Ball, 2010; Unger, 1998).
Here, we focus on how, from psychology of gender’s murky
beginnings in early 20th century Freudian personality theory
and even deeper roots in androcentric paternalism of 19th
century science (Shields, 1975, 1982; Shields & Bhatia,
2009), feminist psychologists have shaped how sex and gen-
der are scientifically defined, theorized, and studied. Over the
course of the second half of the 20th century, feminist psy-
chologists challenged psychology’s long-standing equation
of female with defect and the psychology of gender with cat-
aloging sex differences (Marecek, Kimmel, Crawford, &
Hare-Mustin, 2003; Rutherford & Granek, 2010).
We identify three intertwined streams of investigation
from which the contemporary psychology of gender grew:
(a) research focusing on gender identity as a feature of per-
sonality, (b) research on behavioral sex differences, and (c)
research on gender roles and the study of gender in social
context. We interweave into this story how each of the six
key articles highlighted in this special section illustrate turn-
ing points in that history. We then describe the critical
importance of networks and mentors toward making the
research reported in those articles possible. We conclude
with our thoughts on future directions in the social psychol-
ogy of gender.
Three Streams of Research
Personality and Gender Identity
Sigmund Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909 (at G.
Stanley Hall’s invitation) was a signal moment for both Freu-
dian and American psychology. Although many American
scientists were disdainful of Freud’s ideas, he found a culture
receptive to his ideas about unconscious motivation and the
structure of personality; in turn, U.S. popular culture found
a psychological theory that meshed with American sensibil-
ities (Fancher, 2000; Lepore, 2011). One by-product of this
love affair between Freud’s theory and U.S. popular and
intellectual culture is the instant map of gender difference
that came with it. The core idea was that male–female psy-
chological differences were natural, deep-seated, and of pro-
found personal and social consequence. This proposal easily
built upon the already-accepted Anglo-American belief in
‘‘natural’’ gender differences as differentiating ‘‘advanced’’
races from the more ‘‘primitive’’ (Shields & Bhatia, 2009).
Furthermore, biological sex, gender identity, adherence to
gender roles, and sexual orientation were considered mono-
lithic, that is, completely consistent with one another in
‘‘normal’’ individuals. For example, the healthy and normal
girl or woman identified herself as female, conformed to
cultural expectations for appropriate feminine personality
and demeanor, and was heterosexual. These ideas, of
course, built on already prevailing beliefs and had long-
term effects for how gender was studied by psychologists.
1 Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University
Park, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Stephanie A. Shields, Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State
University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Email: sashields@psu.edu
Psychology of Women Quarterly 35(3) 491-499 ª The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0361684311414823 http://pwq.sagepub.com
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1177%2F0361684311414823&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2011-08-31
The Freudian version of gender psychology held sway
until feminist psychologists began to challenge academic and
clinical formulations of female nature in the 1960s. (Earlier
challenges to a female-deficit model had come from within
the psychoanalytic community, most notably by Karen Hor-
ney and Clara Thompson, but their theories are beyond the
scope of this commentary.) Behaviorism, the dominant para-
digm in U.S. academic psychology through most of the first
half of the 20th century, was not concerned with individual
differences (such as gender differences) or personality,
which further pushed the psychology of women and gender
under the Freudian umbrella. By that time, alternative views
(e.g., Seward, 1946) and the work of feminist psychologists
from earlier in the century (e.g., Calkins, 1896; Hollingworth,
1914, 1916; Tanner, 1896; Thompson, 1903) had been written
out of histories of psychology.
The systematic search for stable, enduring traits that
unambiguously distinguish one sex psychologically from the
other was an enterprise begun in earnest in the 1930s. The
first masculinity/femininity (M/F) scale was developed by
Terman and Miles (1936), who were best known for research
with high-intelligence quotient (IQ) children. The test
comprised over 450 items related to gender-typed interests,
opinions, and emotional reactions and was normed with stu-
dents in elementary and junior high school. The M/F scale
proved impossible to validate against external criteria because
it had low reliability and was uncorrelated with behavioral mea-
sures predicted to be related to it. Nevertheless, the authors
argued the utility of the scale in revealing ‘‘existing differences
in mental masculinity and femininity however caused’’ (Ter-
man & Miles, 1936, p. 6). The impetus behind their research
was the desire to create an assessment tool that could reliably
detect a propensity for ‘‘sexual inversion’’ (in the language of
psychology at the time), that is, homosexuality. The gay male
was presumed to be psychologically feminine, and Terman
and Miles wished to demonstrate that boys of high IQ were
no more likely to be sexual inverts than other boys.
We describe Terman and Miles’ (1936) project in some
detail for two reasons. First, it inspired other attempts to mea-
sure M/F through participants’ endorsement of gender stereo-
types, assuming that psychological gender was a deep-seated
and enduring trait and was difficult to measure accurately
without disguising the purpose of the test (Lewin, 1984a,
1984b; Morawski, 1987). Second, it uncovers the assumption
that sexual orientation is revealed through endorsement of
gender stereotypes and culturally constructed gender roles.
For example, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inven-
tory (MMPI) femininity scale was famously normed on a
group of 13 homosexual men (Lewin, 1984b)! By the early 1970s, the assumption that M/F represented
opposite anchors on a unidimensional, bipolar continuum was
challenged by a new generation of feminist psychologists
(Bem, 1974; Constantinople, 1973). The notion of psycholo-
gical M/F as a unified trait-like feature of personality was
retained, but now its elements (femininity and masculinity)
were hypothesized to be orthogonal, each expressed on its
own low to high continuum. Thus, an individual could be
described as high or low F and high or low M. The original
aim of M/F tests—to identify sexual inverts—was eclipsed
by concerns with a new kind of psychological health—andro-
gyny, that is, rating oneself as high on both positive stereoty-
pical M and F attributes (e.g., Bem, 1981). Despite the
patently sex-stereotypical content of M/F inventories, many
embraced the view that the extent to which an individual is
willing to describe herself or himself in terms of stereotypes
is a legitimate indicator of healthy psychological gender (see
Morawski, 1987, for an insightful critique). Just as Terman
and Miles (1936) discovered 40 years earlier, these new
M/F scales did not serve as good predictors of either gen-
dered behavior or other dimensions of gender.
In the present anniversary section, Spence’s (2011) over-
view of the course of her research vividly documents the shift
from reliance on the personality approach (as reflected in the
use of M/F scales) to a more complex conceptualization of
gender. For example, early in her work on gender, Spence
and her colleagues found that M/F scores were uncorrelated,
independent constructs and were therefore inappropriately
represented as opposite ends of a single continuum (Spence,
Helmreich, & Stapp, 1975). Later, she showed that higher
masculinity scores were associated with higher self-esteem
in both men and women, countering the idea that one needed
to score highly on both the M and the F scales (considered to
be ‘‘androgynous’’) to be psychologically healthy (Spence
& Helmreich, 1980). This study, and others that followed,
revealed the multidimensionality of gender—that is, ‘‘gen-
der’’ encompasses distinct factors that cannot be used to pre-
dict or make generalizations about gender-related attitudes
or behaviors (Spence, 1993).
Before we move to the second stream of research that con-
tributed to present-day psychology…
