Brief Lecture Notes for Unit 11
The terms gender, gender identity, gender role, gender differences, gender stereotypes, and gender expectations need to be carefully distinguished in this unit:
With regard to gender differences, it's important to remember that when comparing any social groups -- males vs. females being just one of many possible examples -- the differences within a given group (intragroup differences) almost always exceed, by a wide margin, the differences between "average" members of the two groups (intergroup differences). For instance, while males on average are more aggressive than females on average, this difference is much smaller than the difference between the most and the least aggressive male in the population. Keep this in mind in considering gender differences. Those listed below are "real" (that is, empirically confirmed and statistically significant), but they don't tell the whole story. Intragroup differences are the other, and often neglected, side of the story. Averages aren't everything; ask the statistician who drowned in a river with an average depth of only six inches!
Empirically verified gender differences
There aren't all that many of them, if you only count those that reach the level of scrupulous scientific scrutiny (try saying that five times fast). There are at least six such differences, all of them more complex than they sound:
1. Males are more vulnerable than females at any age, both physically and psychologically. (Men die earlier, and incidence/prevalence rates for most physical and psychological disorders are higher for males.) This is likely due in part to the influence of sex-linked recessive traits; recall from an earlier unit that the more rare a recessive sex-linked allele is in the gene pool, the greater the gender disparity in the expression of that trait. (If you aren't too math-phobic, you should be able to see why: if p% of the alleles are the undesirable recessive allele, p% of males but only p2% of females should show the trait. Thus, if 10% of the alleles are "bad", 1 in 10 males but only 1 in 100 females, for instance, would show the trait.)
2. Males are more aggressive (though this depends in part on what kinds of behavior get counted as "aggression") and more likely to be recipients of aggression, at least prior to the onset of puberty, as well if one considers only peer-to-peer aggression. Reasons are complex and include both nativist and empiricist influences. (Male aggression tapers off around age 35, suggesting a link to testosterone levels.)
3. Females (primarily but not exclusively between the ages of 2 and 8) are more verbally skilled than males, partly due to complex differences in hemispheric lateralization, partly due to socialization patterns as discussed in the unit on friendship patterns.
4. Males (beginning around age 10 and continuing thereafter) show stronger visual-spatial skills such as those that would be involved in mechanical reasoning. These appear to be largely hard-wired differences possibly mediated by differences in hemispheric independence.
5. Males (starting around age 12) often do better than females on mathematical tasks, though this difference appears to be primarily a product of differential socialization; the gender gap can be lessened substantially through appropriate educational interventions (e.g., attributional retraining, female-only math classes).
6. Cognitive style differences between males and females are subtle but measurable. As a group (with many individual exceptions) males are more harric (analytical, impersonal reasoners) while females as a group (with many individual exceptions are more premsic (empathic, personal reasoners) -- remember our discussion of this in the unit on moral reasoning. These differences probably are rooted in gender-based interaction and communication patterns (e.g., Tannen's idea of "genderlects").
A psychodynamic model of gender identification
The purpose of this model is not simply to understand how children come to identify with same-sex gender models and gender roles, but also to explain behavioral, personality, and relational differences between the sexes.
Freud believed -- quite sensibly, it seems to me -- that the amount of emotional energy (his term was libidinal, which does not refer only to sexuality in a narrow sense, but rather, to all forms of emotional energy of whatever sort) in the personality is basically a fixed quantity. Certainly we all know from experience that our time, and our other resources, are finite and limited: to choose to invest in certain activities, relationships, or commitments means that we must pass others by. (Some students, who try to take an overload at the university while holding down two jobs and raising a family, seem not to understand this point.) He used the term cathexis to refer to the process of investing emotional energy in a given situation, task, object, or relationship. (The plural is cathexes, the verb form is cathect.) At one level or in one sense, life is all about making and breaking cathexes: deciding how to invest the emotional energy we have, or put more simply, deciding how to prioritize and make choices, how to choose a certain kind of life.
Consider the situation of an involuntary job loss: to deal productively with such a situation, one must first let go (decathect) from the old job and old vocational identity, which usually means a grieving process; then, one must find a new source of vocational identity to which one can re-establish a relationship (recathect). Note that both processes take time and have a natural rhythm of their own that can't easily be rushed; there is an old counseling saying that goes, "You don't push the river, the river carries you." Note also that in healthy people, there is not a rush to prematurely recathect (e.g., the ill-advised job choice, the "rebound" relationship, the "I'll show them" choice made out of spite), but rather, a willingness to engage a rather ambiguous process that lies in between decathexis and recathexis. Between these two processes of "saying goodbye" and "saying hello" is an in-between state that William Bridges calls the "neutral zone". At these times, certainty and stability are at a minimum (no clear cathexis), but possibility and opportunity are at a maximum (emotional energy is freed up from the previous cathexis, and can be invested in a variety of different ways).
All our later relationships, and in fact all of our later cathexes whether relational or of some other type (e.g., vocational identity), are rooted in our first experience of cathecting emotional energy, our attachment relationship with (typically) our mother, or what Freud called the anaclitic cathexis. (The word "anaclitic" comes from a Greek word meaning "to lean upon"; hence, the idea is that of a pure dependency relationship.) From the standpoint of gender identity, the point at issue is that as infants, both boys and girls cathect primarily to the mother; but by age 5 or so (when gender identity is more or less fixed), while girls can retain this initial cathexis and build a gender identity around it, boys must find a way to break that cathexis and recathect around gender identification with the father. From this fundamental fact, Freud suggests, come many of the gender differences in behavior, personality, and outlook.
Freud's discussion of the Oepidal conflict or complex (in boys) and the Electra conflict or complex (in girls) is his attempt to explain the process by which infant anaclitic cathexis is transformed into school-age same-sex gender identification. In boys, the idea is that out of the original anaclitic cathexis (love for and need for the mother) comes a perception that the father is a rival for the mother's affections, leading to a (largely unconscious) desire to eliminate the father and solely possess the mother. However, the realization that the young boy's rival is stronger and more powerful generates anxiety that is resolved by repudiating (at least at a conscious level) the original anaclitic bond, "rejecting" the values and behaviors of femininity in favor of identifying with the father. This happens primarily through a process of introjection, by which the boy "copies" his father's behaviors and values, making them his own or taking the father as a role model. Whether correct or not, this model is at least easy to understand, unambiguous and without logical contradictions, and explains why boys must experience an extreme, even violent repudiation of their first attachment relationship (the anaclitic cathexis). Of the consequences of this, more in a moment: but note that the resolution of this conflict involves issues of power (or dominance-submission) -- the "vertical" relationship model that, later, comes to characterize most, if not all, male-male interactions throughout life. The young boy takes a one-down position (relinquishing his contest with the father) so that he can symbolically or vicariously share in his victory, and by modeling his behavior, can some day become "like" his father (marry someone who is "like" his mother, and so on). This is all at a purely unconscious level, of course, rendering empirical confirmation of the model difficult if not impossible. But it does, at least, predict the kinds of adult relationship patterns that really do usually occur.
Of the analogous process in girls, most contemporary psychologists would agree that Freud had great difficulty explaining the female experience. At best he was clueless, at worst misogynistic; at any rate, his explanations lack clarity and cohesion in the extreme. The primary problem is to explain, if the infant girl's primary attachment is to her mother, how the father enters the picture at all. To begin to view the mother as a rival for the father's affections (as Freud's model must presume), there must be a way for an attachment to the father to develop, but Freud's view of anaclitic cathexis leaves the father out of the picture entirely. Freud's attempts to explain this are weak at best. But regardless of the utility or ineffectiveness of his process model at this point, the end result is at least clear: girls end up identifying with the same adult with whom they had the original attachment relationship, which means that gender identity for girls involves an extension or elaboration of the anaclitic cathexis, not a rejection or repudiation of it. Thus, the female experience in childhood involves a sense of continuity, while the male experience involves a sense of radical discontinuity. Thus, female-female interactions tend to involve, not "vertical" issues of power, but "horizontal" issues of connectivity or inclusion.
Note that this model explains, not only gender identification as such, but a range of other gender differences, such as:
1. The greater vulnerability of males to psychological dysfunction. Because preschool boys undergo a trauma that preschool girls do not -- they have to give up their "first love" and turn their back on their infant source of security -- all males, Freud would say (using modern language that was not available to him in his day), experience a sort of subclinical post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They have had to survive a psychic shock (discontinuity) that is part of the universal male experience, but not that of the universal female experience. Hence, some stereotypically male characteristics (e.g., unemotionality) parallel, to a lesser degree, the symptoms of true clinical PTSD (e.g., emotional blunting or flattened affect). "Normal male alexithymia" is the term modern clinicians apply to this phenomenon. (Alexithymia means emotional blindness or difficulties in expressing emotionality.) Of course, most men are not clinically alexithymic. But many are subclinically so, at least compared to women -- or so the theory runs, though this remains a hotbed of controversy among modern clinicians.
2. The much greater intolerance in most societies for cross-gender role behavior in males vs. females. Of this more will be said below as we explore Sandra Bem's model, but even the most casual observer can spot the phenomenon. A grade school girl that "does boy things" (wears pants, likes sports, plays mostly with boys, acts "tough") gets called a "tomboy", and most parents view this with benign neglect as a normal personality variant and nothing to worry about. But a grade school girl that "does girl things" (wears dresses, likes dolls, plays mostly with girls, acts "tender") would set off alarm bells in the minds of nearly all parents -- "sissy" is by far the kindest term peers would apply. Why? In part, Freud would say, because the process of male gender identification requires a violent repudiation of the female experience (the anaclitic cathexis); the only way to cope with the tremendous loss of the maternal bond is to engage in a process of hostile rejection of it (a defense mechanism). (You may have noticed in your own life that one way to deal with wanting something you shouldn't have is to tell yourself how much you really don't want it. The deeper the conflict, the more violent -- and usually more unconscious -- this mechanism becomes.) Girls, who can develop gender identity though a much calmer, more integrated or assimilative process (building on the foundation of the original anaclitic cathexis), have no such need to repudiate masculinity. Or so the theory runs (there are other explanations for this gender bias in society that are not Freudian in character, of course).
3. Why adolescent boys and adolescent girls use opposite strategies of individuation (which extrapolate into adulthood as well). "Individuation" means the process of becoming separate from one's family of origin, of developing an independent or autonomous sense of self (note the links to Erikson's identity stage). Boys tend to individuate by withdrawing from parents, while girls tend to individuate by escalating interactions (usually conflictual ones) with parents. Why? Freud would say it's because boys learned at an early age to cut the ties, girls to establish and strengthen the ties (which makes it harder for females to individuate, since individuation does mean decathexis). So boys pull back (communicate less), girls intensify (communicate more). Note that this is the same pattern usually seen in adult male-female conflict situations: men cope by "stonewalling", women by "flooding" -- unfortunately, each person's coping strategy is the worst possible stress trigger for the other. "I don't want to talk about this" is the typical male response; "we have to talk about this" is the typical female response.
Three views of gender roles
The old idea of gender roles is to think of masculinity and femininity as opposites (a univariate model). That is, anything a person does to become more masculine automatically and simultaneously makes that person less feminine, and vice versa. Masculinity and femininity are seen as opposite poles of a single dimension. While this is a continuum, not a dichotomy (there can be degrees of masculinity-femininity), one single variable or single dimension is involved. Some psychological measures (e.g., the MMPI) still make use of this approach, though they usually relabel the variable as something else. Usually what is involved is the harria-premsia dimension outlined above.
Sandra Bem's revolutionary idea was to suggest that masculinity and femininity, as two desirable traits, are not opposite at all, but independent or orthogonal. That is, knowing how masculine a person is tells one nothing about how feminine that person is. To see how this works, one must somewhat redefine masculinity and femininity. Most of what our culture thinks of as desirable masculine traits involve what Bem calls instrumentality or agency: the ability to effectively manage the outer, impersonal, goal-oriented world of results and outcomes (e.g., self-assertion, mastery, achievement orientation). Most of what our culture thinks of as desirable feminine traits involve what she calls expressivity, communion, or nurturance: the ability to effectively manage the inner, personal, process-oriented world of feelings and relationships (e.g., empathy, sensitivity, caring). Her idea is that a person could in fact excel at both; instead of having a single dimension, we have two, yielding (what else?) a 2 x 2 or quadrant model:
As with Baumrind's model in an earlier unit, there is obviously a preferred quadrant, the androgynous quadrant, the argument being that a person who has two valuable skill sets (agency and communion) has more behavioral flexibility, and is more likely to function well in a variety of life settings, than someone who has only one skill or the other. Much of the research based on Bem's model represents an attempt to test that hypothesis, to look for correlations between androgyny and psychological adjustment of various kinds. While this is by no means a value-free model (if indeed such a thing is even possible -- a different topic for another day), at least this is an empirically testable hypothesis, that has received a reasonable degree of confirmation.
Cross-gender role patterns (men who are more communal than agentic, or women who are more agentic than communal) show the same gender bias that Freud predicted above:
Bem offers a sociological, not a psychodynamic, explanation of this fact (rooted in the notion that, in our society, the male role is seen as higher in status). Interestingly, her model emerged at a time when gender role differentations were being minimized (an Idealist generation); whether the model would hold true at other times remains to be seen.
A still more contemporary approach is to attempt to link Bem's model to the so-called interpersonal circumplex, which is a model of communication that was originally developed for reasons other than the study of gender role behavior.
If we make the Big Five dimension of Agreeableness the X-axis or horizontal axis on a Cartesian coordinate plot, and make Extraversion the Y-axis or vertical axis, then the space defined by these two axes (with the population average on both dimensions defining the midpoint) can be styled the "interpersonal circumplex", because in the minds of many communication theorists, these two dimensions in combination largely determine how you relate to, communicate with, and interact with others. (In fact, the model is also called a circumplex because it is said to have some complex statistical properties that I won't bother you with here.)
For instance, those most likely to be seen by others as "warm" are E+ A+ types, who have both an outgoing and a cooperative nature. Those most likely to be seen as "cold" (but who may not be bothered by that designator) are E- A- types, who have both a reserved and a competitive nature.
Those most likely to be seen by others as dominant (as "leaders" in a conventional sense) are E+ A- types, who are outgoing yet competitive. Those most likely to be seen as submissive or "followers" are E- A+ types, with their combination of reserve and cooperation.
Using this approach, we can define agency as being mostly a matter of self-assertion or an outward focus (E+), and communion as being mostly a matter of effective relationality or an emotive focus (A+). Thus Bem's four quadrants map onto the circumplex as follows:
Androgynous = E+ A+ (agentic and communal)
Masculine = E+ A- (agentic but not communal)
Feminine = E- A+ (communal but not agentic)
Undifferentiated = E- A- (neither agentic nor communal)
Advantages of this model include (a) links to general models of communication, interaction, and personality that are not about gender roles as such, (b) a more balanced recognition of the fact that extremes in any direction (including excessive androgyny) tend to become dysfunctional or pathological. (Thus, PSY 309 students know that extreme E+ A+ types tend to develop histrionic-narcissistic personality disorders; extreme E+ A- types, antisocial-sadistic disorders; extreme E- A+ types, avoidant-dependent disorders; extreme E- A- types, schizoid-schizotypal disorders. If you're not in PSY 309, don't worry too much about this. But worry a little, because worry is an important part of life.) The fact that men and women have differing pathologies is explained by this fact. (Note links to gender differences in the handling of Erikson's intimacy stage also.)
Study Guide
1. Explain differences in the use and meaning of the terms: gender, gender identity, gender role, gender differences, gender stereotypes, gender expectations.
2. Discuss the difference between intragroup and intergroup differences, and the importance of this concept.
3. State six empirically verified gender differences. Provide likely explanations of each.
4. Summarize the psychodynamic model of gender identification. Include an explanation of the meaning of the following terms: libidinal, cathexis, anaclitic, Oedipal/Electra complex, introjection, continuity vs. discontinuity.
5. Discuss how this model can explain such phenomena as (a) male psychological vulnerability, (b) cultural intolerance of cross-gender role behavior in males, (c) differences in male vs. female conflict patterns (including adolescent strategies of individuation).
6. Compare and contrast the three views of gender roles discussed in lecture. Include a discussion of agency, communion, androgyny, and the interpersonal circumplex.