Gender & Development (College Board AP® Psychology): Revision Note

Gender identity and socialization

• Sex refers to the biological characteristics that distinguish males and females

  • This includes chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive anatomy

• Gender refers to the psychological and social meaning attached to being male or female

  • This covers relationships between people as well as the norms, behaviours, and roles that come with being a girl, boy, woman, or man

  • Gender as a social construct differs from society to society and changes over time

• Gender identity is a person's internal sense of their own gender

  • It may be binary (male or female), non-binary, or may not correspond to the biological sex assigned at birth

    • Children begin to develop gender identity from as early as age two to three

• Gender roles are the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that a culture associates with being male or female

  • Gender roles vary widely across cultures. A behavior considered masculine in one culture may be considered feminine or gender-neutral in another

• Gender typing is the process through which children acquire the behaviors, attitudes, and preferences that their culture considers appropriate for their sex

  • This typically emerges between ages two and seven

• Androgyny refers to the display of both stereotypically masculine and feminine characteristics

  • Sandra Bem (1974) developed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a self-report scale on which individuals rate themselves on masculine and feminine traits

  • Bem proposed that androgynous individuals are better able to adapt to a variety of social contexts than those who score exclusively high on one dimension

Social learning theory and gender development

• Social learning theory proposes that gender roles are learned through observation, imitation, and reinforcement; they are not determined solely by biology

• Children learn via:

  • Direct reinforcement: children receive positive reinforcement for gender-appropriate behavior and punishment for gender-inappropriate behavior

    • E.g. a boy is praised for helping his father with outdoor tasks, but is discouraged from playing with makeup. Over time he internalizes that these are gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate behaviors respectively

  • Vicarious reinforcement: children observe others being rewarded or punished for gender-typed behavior and adjust their own behavior accordingly

    • E.g. a girl observes her older sister being praised for being nurturing and gentle. She learns that these are desirable feminine behaviors without having to experience the reinforcement directly

  • Modelling: children observe and imitate the behavior of same-sex role models, particularly those they admire

    • E.g. a boy who admires his father is more likely to imitate his father's gender-typed behavior than a boy who has a less close relationship with his father

Research support

• Fagot & Leinbach (1995) found that four-year-olds in traditional families displayed more gender role stereotyping and used gender labels earlier than children in less traditional families

  • Traditional families were those where the father worked outside the home and the mother stayed home

• This suggests that parents act as powerful gender role models and that the home environment shapes gender development through differential reinforcement

Gender schema theory

• Gender schema theory proposes that children develop cognitive frameworks, or gender schemas, about what is associated with being male or female

• Children use these schemas to organize their understanding of the world and guide their own behavior:

  • Gender schemas begin to develop between ages two and three

  • Children are socialized into a binary view of gender through toys, clothing, language, parental behavior, and media, which vary according to gender

  • By around age three, children have developed in-group schemas (associated with their own sex) and out-group schemas (associated with the opposite sex):

    • In-group schemas motivate gender-consistent behavior, as children seek out and attend to information that matches their own gender

    • Out-group schemas are initially ignored, as children pay less attention to and are less likely to remember information inconsistent with their gender schema

Research support

• Martin & Halverson (1983) found that children under six recalled more gender-consistent pictures (e.g. a male firefighter) than gender-inconsistent pictures (e.g. a female firefighter)

  • This supports the idea that gender schemas selectively influence memory

• Gender schema theory explains why children act in gender-consistent ways before they fully understand the concept of gender

  • Gender identity alone is sufficient to motivate schema-consistent behavior

Cultural influences on gender development

• If gender is learned through socialization, then the surrounding culture will shape what gender-typed behaviors are learned

  • This provides evidence that gender roles are at least partly socially constructed

• Cross-cultural research demonstrates significant variation in gender roles:

  • Margaret Mead's (1935) research in Papua New Guinea found that gender roles and behaviors were not fixed but culturally bound

    • This challenges the assumption that gender differences are universal or biologically determined

  • In Sweden, many fathers take extended paternity leave to raise young children while their partners return to work

    • This provides children with a non-traditional model of male gender roles

  • Many non-Western cultures recognize gender identities beyond the binary

    • the Hijra in India are recognized as a third gender with a long cultural history

    • the Bugis people of South Sulawesi, Indonesia recognize multiple genders beyond the male/female binary

• The existence of diverse gender identities across cultures provides evidence that gender roles and identities are shaped by social and cultural factors rather than determined solely by biology