Chapter 11

Key Terms

Gender-role stereotypes: culturally-determined expectations concerning jobs and activities thought suitable for males and females.

Gender-typed behaviour: behaviour conforming to that expected on the basis of any given culture’s gender-role stereotypes.

Gender identity: our awareness of being male or female; it depends to an important extent on social rather than biological factors.

Gender similarities hypothesis: the notion that there are only small differences between males and females with respect to the great majority of psychological variables (e.g., abilities; personality).

Observational learning: learning based on watching others’ behaviour, copying rewarded behaviour but not punished behaviour.

Direction tuition: a way of increasing a child’s gender identity and gender-typed behaviour by receiving instruction from others.

Enactive experience: this involves the child learning which behaviours are expected of their gender within any given culture as a result of being rewarded or punished for behaving in different ways.

Gender segregation: the tendency for young children from about 3 years to play mostly with same-sex peers.

Gender schemas: organised knowledge stored in long-term memory in the form of numerous beliefs about forms of behaviour appropriate for each gender.

Congenital adrenal hyperplasia: an inherited disorder of the adrenal gland causing the levels of male sex hormones in foetuses of both sexes to be unusually high.

Androgen: male sex hormones (e.g., testosterone) typically produced in much greater quantity by males than by females.

Gender identity disorder: distress associated with a conflict between biological gender and the gender with which an individual identifies.

Androgny: a term referring to an individual having a combination of masculine and feminine qualities.

Weblinks

Useful summary overviewing the topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQMoTjB4_80

Interviews with children on gender identity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZb2len6f18

Gender theory demonstration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BFDgO_y9cc

An APA article: Men and Women: No Big Difference
http://www.apa.org/research/action/difference.aspx

Find out about “brain sex” differences by taking this test
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml

Big Picture on Sex and Gender
https://bigpictureeducation.com/sex-and-gender

The story of the “Guevedoces” of the Dominican Republic
http://www.usrf.org/news/010308-guevedoces.html

Living with congenital adrenal hyperplasia: A support group
http://www.livingwithcah.com/

The Bem Sex Role Inventory
http://personality-testing.info/tests/BSRI.php

Deaux, K. (2009). The Lenses of gender: transforming the debate on sexual inequality (book). Link is to a text you may choose to access.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327965pli0501_16?journalCode=hpli20