Gender

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Gender
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Gender, Gender Identity, and Transgender

• Gender refers to the entire constellation of
  mental and behavioral traits that differ in males
  and females it permeates every aspect of our
  lives.
• Gender identity is a persons subjective sense of
  femaleness or maleness, and it is the core of
  oneself.
• For 99.9 percent of people, gender identity is
  consistent with sexual anatomy.
• Discordance between anatomical sex and gender
  identity is termed gender dysphoria.

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Gender, Gender Identity, and Transgender (contd)

• Sexual orientation is the direction of an
  individuals sexual attractions. Most, but not
  all, men are sexually attracted to women. Most,
  but not all, women are sexually attracted to men.
• Multiple factors, including both innate
  predispositions and life experiences, interact in
  the development of gender-related traits.

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Gender, Gender Identity, and Transgender (contd)

• Gender-variant individuals may adopt behaviors
  that are not entirely typical either of females
  or of males (see Figure 7.1).
• The sex role inventory developed by Sandra Bem in
  1974 (and still in use) lists 60 adjectives
  describing personality traits. Bem studied gender
  according to two dimensions masculinityunmasculi
  nity and femininityunfemininity. A person
  scoring low on both masculinity and femininity
  was considered undifferentiated, whereas a
  person scoring high on both dimensions was
  psychologically androgynous.

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7.1 Zuni Wewha
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Gender, Gender Identity, and Transgender (contd)

• Transgender is an increasingly popular term
  used to describe gender-atypical persons (see
  photo p. 191).
• Transexuals are gender dysphoric, meaning that
  they experience a discordance between their
  anatomical sex and their gender identity.
• Transexuals may be either androphilic (attracted
  to males) or gynephilic (attracted to females).

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Photo p. 191 Alain Berliners 1997 film Ma Vie
en Rose
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Gender Differences in Cognitive and Personality
Traits

• Cognitive traits include perception, motor
  performance, reasoning, judgment, knowledge, and
  memory personality traits include behavior,
  feelings, attitudes, goals, and values.
• Men outperform women in some visuospatial skills
  such as rotation of three-dimensional objects
  (see Figure 7.3), throwing accuracy, and
  navigation with reference to compass directions
  women navigate as well as or better than men with
  reference to landmarks, and they have better
  control of hand and finger musculature.

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7.3 Mental rotation task
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Gender Differences in Cognitive and Personality
Traits (contd)

• Females outperform males in verbal fluency and
  verbal memory skills, whereas males outperform
  females in mathematical reasoning and problem
  solving.
• In personality traits, men score higher than
  women on aggressiveness (see photo p. 196) and
  self-esteem women score higher than men on
  emotional sensitivity and a sense of caring.

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Photo p. 196 Wanton violence is predominantly a
male activity
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Gender Differences in Sexuality

• Men express far more permissive attitudes than
  women toward masturbation and toward casual,
  premarital, and extramarital sex women tend to
  view sex as a prelude to a long-term
  relationship.
• In comparison to females, males masturbate and
  have sexual intercourse at a younger age and with
  greater frequency males also have a larger
  number of sex partners.

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Gender Differences in Sexuality (contd)

• Statistically, women are attracted to older
  partners with status and wealth men are
  attracted to younger partners who are physically
  attractive.
• Women experience emotional jealousy men
  experience sexual jealousy.
• The prevalence of homosexuality is higher in men
  than in women the prevalence of bisexuality is
  higher in women than in men.

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Gender Differences Arise Early in Life

• Infants can discriminate between male and female
  faces and voices.
• Children 23 years of age can identify their own
  sex and categorize themselves with other same-sex
  children.
• Gender constancy, or the realization that sex
  categories are permanent, appears at 34 years of
  age (see Figure 7.6).

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7.6 Gender constancy
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Gender Differences Arise Early in Life (contd)

• Male fetuses are more active than females, a
  difference that persists throughout childhood.
• Newborn boys are more wakeful than girls and cry
  more readily in response to pain.
• By 23 years of age, most girls prefer girls as
  playmates and boys prefer boys boys tend to be
  competitive, whereas girls tend to be
  cooperative.
• In classroom performance, girls tend to get
  better grades in most subjects and across most
  age levels.

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Theories Concerning the Origin of Gender
Differences

• Evolutionary theory suggests that mental and
  behavioral traits are heritable and have evolved
  over a long period of evolution.
• According to the biological theory, mental
  differences between men and women are the
  manifestation of sex-differentiated brain systems.

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Theories Concerning the Origin of Gender
Differences (contd)

• The socialization theory holds that
  gender-related traits are inculcated in children
  by learning from their parents, teachers,
  siblings, peers, and society in general.
• Behaviorism is learning theory that includes
  studies of classical and instrumental
  conditioning according to this model, behavior
  is molded by judiciously timed rewards and
  punishments or by positive and negative
  reinforcement.

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Theories Concerning the Origin of Gender
Differences (contd)

• Feminist theory claims that gender development is
  influenced by socialization (by parents, schools,
  television, etc.).
• Cognitive developmental theory asserts that the
  key process in gender development is the sequence
  of ideas and understanding or thought processes
  that a child has concerning gender theories of
  gender constancy, gender schema, and sexual
  scripts are offshoots of cognitive developmental
  theory.
• In summary, the development of gender traits is
  probably multifactorial, and all the theories or
  the interaction of theories may be necessary for
  a full understanding of the process.