Psychological Gender Issues

According to a national survey of high school students, what percentage of boys and girls had carried a weapon to school?

27% of boys and 7% of girls

What is a moderating variable?

A variable that alters the relation between the independent and dependent variable

Which of the following is true about how Bem (1984) advised about how to raise children to be gender aschematic?

Both girls and boys could wear shirts, pants, dresses and barrettes

Describe the story of Bruce Reimer. According to Diamond, Sigmundson, and Colapinto's version of the story, what was the actual outcome of the attempt to make Bruce a girl?

Boy who went to go get circumcised, routine procedure ending up getting messed up, Bruce's penis was extremely messed up, his parents talked to dr. money and Bruce had the surgery to become a girl, Bruce became Brenda, did not accept being a girl and wanted to be a boy, at the age of 14 his dad told him the truth and Brenda had the surgery to reverse the effects of the first surgery and then got married at 25 and then committed suicide at the age of 38

For which sex is reinforcement stricter for? Provide an example. Why might this difference occur?

Boys, girls play with trucks and no punishment, but boys play with dolls, and they get punished, parents are scared that boys will become homosexual

The belief that competence is due to fixed ability and cannot be changed is the basis for:

Entity theory of competence

Which of the following is true about the most recent books published for children?

Females and males are represented equally, but males have more diverse roles in the books

Which of the following has been identified as a problem with Freud's theory of gender-role acquisition?

Freud's theory only discusses male gender-role acquisition, not female gender-role acquisition

When is observational learning more likely to occur?

If the reaction was positive

Which of the following statements is true, according to Social Learning Theory?

Initially, children are not very discriminating about whose behavior they imitate

Who did Judith Harris believe had the most effect on children's gender development? Explain Harris's group socialization theory.

Peers, children learn behavior inside the home and test it outside the home

In what areas are women more likely to show a lack of confidence compared to men despite equal levels of performance?

STEM

How might it influence findings on sex differences?

Teenagers would be more focused on adhering to the gender roles instead of being themselves

What was the age bias she noted in the studies and why is this a problem?

The study was done on kids 12 years or younger

Discuss the findings from the Voyer, Voyer, and Bryden meta-analysis on spatial skills.

They all had a positive effect size which means that it gave the sex difference to men

Why is it that women may appear less confident?

They are reluctant to display confidence when they have outperformed another person because women don't want to threaten another's self-esteem

The encouragement of sex-typed toys is the major way in which parents tend to treat children differently.

True

How did women and men respond in the study examining self-esteem of bank employees before and after they met with their supervisors for their annual performance evaluation?

Women it depended on their feedback, but men showed no change in their self-esteem

How do men and women respond to feedback differently?

Women take it to heart, men do not

What are demand characteristics?

a concern of self, means that people think about what experimenters want them to show so people report more gender stereotype behavior

What is a meta-analysis?

a statistical tool that quantifies the results of a group of studies

Provide some examples of potential moderating variables.

age, gender role, author's sex, and the year of publication

How do age and the type of object influence findings in this domain?

age-larger sex difference once you hit age 13, type of object- women do better if the objects are feminine or neutral and men do better if objects are masucline

Have crime statistics changed over time for boys and girls? Explain.

arrest rates for girls have increased over time

Define fear of success

as having or believed that negative consequences will occur due to environment

What may have been the cause of this difference? (Shaywitz study)

authors found that teachers view reading disability as overreactive and having other behavioral problems then boys who don't have a reading disability

What was Jeanne Block's criticism regarding the quality of studies included in the Maccoby and Jacklin's review of the literature on gender differences?

averaged all of their studies whether or not it was a good study

What is a problem with women "appearing" less confident?

behavior often shapes attitudes, may come to express the opinions about yourself

How are effect sizes interpreted?

calculated by taking the difference between the means of the two groups and dividing that by the variability in the scores of the members of the two groups

What did women do, and what do women do, when they have a high need for achievement but believe achievement conflicts with their gender-role?

conceal achievements, adopting the extreme, master both roles

What concerns did female engineering students express about their future careers?

conflict with work and family, lack of female role models, lack of confidence, discriminatory attitudes

Based on the study of female twelfth graders who aimed to pursue traditionally masculine fields, but switched to neutral or feminine fields seven years later, what were the reasons for their switch?

desire a job with greater flexibility, unhappy with the high time demand, and women said they realized that they had low intrinsic interest in the value of physical sciences

In what ways did parents treat boys and girls different according to the research by Lytton and Romney?

didn't encourage cross-sexed toys

For what types of research methods are sex differences more and less likely to be found?

empathy

What are the dimensions of attributions? Provide an example of each.

external/internal, stable/unstable - external, unstable= weather, internal, stable= your ability

Which parent was most likely to treat boys and girls differently?

fathers

Define empathy

feeling the same emotion as another person or feeling compassion and concern for another person

Which of the following is true about sex differences in empathy?

findings depend on how empathy is measured

In the study by Shaywitz and colleagues examining reading disabilities, what were the findings regarding school reports of reading disabilities versus what the researchers found?

found that schools were 2-4x more likely to identify boys with learning disability than girls

Biological theories of sex differences focus on:

genes and hormones as well as the structure and functions of the brain

What is necessary in order to have a fear of success?

have to believe that negative consequences that will result from that achievement, also have to believe that achievement is possible

How did the author influence the effect sizes in the meta-analysis?

it was a woman author so it favored womenfo

Why might the file-drawer problem not be as significant in studies of sex comparisons?

it would not make that much of a difference because there would need to be a lot of no sex difference to overturn the findings

What were the findings of the review of children's coloring books?

males were portrayed in more action than females, and that gender stereotyped behavior was common

What are the meta-analytic findings regarding gender differences in physical and verbal aggression?

men are more aggressive than women although it depends on what type of aggression is being discussed

A variable that alters the relation between the independent variable and the dependent variable is a ______.

moderating variable

In what spatial domain do women appear to have greater aptitude than men?

object memory

What is entity theory?

parent belief about their children's abilities are especially likely to influence their perceptions and their actual abilities when parents believe that ability is fixed and not changeable

What did Horner note were indicators of fear of success?

perform worse on a task when working with a man opposed to working with a woman, admitted that they would rather tell a man that they got a C on an exam than an A, and that they are more likely to switch from a nontraditional major to a traditional major

Describe how the Thematic Apperception Test works

present people with pictures that depict a scene and ask them to write a story about the picture

What are the limitations of meta-analyses?

researchers are still choosing which studies to include in the study

In what area of verbal skills is the largest gender difference found?

speech production

What is the file-drawer problem?

studies that fail to find a difference are often not published

What are the advantages of a meta-analyses?

takes the size affect of each study into account

What is Bem's advise for raising a gender aschematic child?

teach what sex is, teach what sex is not, counter cultural stereotypes with counter examples, teach what society's view of gender is different than the one you are teaching and society's view is incorrect

What is gender intensification?

teenagers often become more gender stereotype, more concerned with adhering to the gender roles

When females have a high need for achievement but believe achievement conflicts with their gender role they might:

tell their peers that they scored lower on an exam than they really did

What is an effect size and how is it calculated?

tells us what the size of the difference is

What do more recent studies find regarding parents' differential treatment of boys and girls?

that boys are more likely to be punished physically and that, moms spend more time watching boys and actively involving girls

What were the findings from the review of 83 "Notable Books?"

that males had more diverse roles, that females held more traditional roles, male characters were seldom depicted as nurturing, having domestic roles, or interacting with children, noted that males were never depicted doing household chores

What were the findings from the longitudinal study of fourth through sixth graders regarding mothers' perceptions of children's competence?

that their mothers perceptions predicted changed in children's perception of competence 1 year later as children's grades 1 year later

What do observational studies of children tell us about sex differences in aggression?

that there is essentially no sex difference effect size was +0.03

In an older meta-analysis of 165 studies that evaluated verbal ability, what was the effect size found and what does it mean?

the effect size was -.11 and that means that there was a sex difference and it favored women

What is the file drawer problem?

the fact that studies that fail to detect significant differences are unlikely to get published

What does it mean to say that instruments lack construct validity?

unreliable instruments, and no evidence to show that the instruments measured what they claimed to measure

What does it mean to be gender schematic?

uses the gender category to make decisions

What is an attribution?

what you think the cause of the behavior is

What were the findings from the original TAT research? What is one of the problems with these early conclusions?

women have high achievement motivation and women do not, that this test was done in the 50s and was more relevant to men than women