Psychological differences between men and women

The idea that there are psychological differences between men and women are encoded in our language about sex and gender. Masculine and Feminine. The idea of the opposite sex. The words and phrases we have for people who do not fit into gender roles, like Tom Boy or Sissy.

Since at least the 1960s psychology has been trying to scientifically study these differences, either by using laboratory based experiments or using scientifically designed surveys. It would seem reasonable to suggest that in the 21st century we could point out these differences.

Resources

Many of you will not have access to the journal articles.

Sci hub might be a way to get papers, but beware the publishers of journal articles see using it as piracy.

Some early history

While large scale work on psychological differences between men and women would wait until the 1960s, with the increase in women undergraduate students making it easy for psychologists to include sex/gender as an independent variable there was a little bit of work at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Thorndike in 1914  argued that for intelligence, and other traits men showed greater variability than women, and so there would be more men at the two extremes.

Hollingworth (1914), who was Thorndike's PhD student and prior to that New York City's first civil service psychologist, argued against the male variability idea using data that she collected on a range of measures. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hollingworth/sexdiffs.htm

At this time there were societal changes as women argued that they should be more readily admitted to higher education, and should have the vote.

So what are the differences?

In 2005 Hyde published her article claiming that across thousands of studies in psychology there are only three areas where differences between men and women are large enough to have a real world impact, and are consistent across the lifespan and are consistent over the history of testing.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581

The three areas are, physical aggression, physical tasks involving throwing, and some measures of sexuality (men claim to masturbate more than women, men claim to view pornography more often than women, men claim to want more (hetero)sexual partners than women claim to want.

Now quite what physical tasks involving throwing have got to do with psychology I do not know, I suspect that they got included as dependent variable (thing to measure) back in the 1910s and so psychologists keep measuring it.

Of course any individual paper is open to contest, and the way that science moves forward is by arguing about findings and conclusions, so Hyde's paper is not the last word. However, this is the puzzle.

The puzzle

There are several ways of wording this:

If psychological sex/gender differences across a wide range of domains exist why are psychologists so bad at finding them under (for want of a better term) laboratory conditions?

If psychological sex/gender differences do not exist why do psychologists keep looking for them?

Making psychology studies on sex and gender better

In 1979 Unger published a paper "Toward a redefinition of sex and gender'. In the paper Unger argues that psychologists need to be much more careful in how they do sex and gender work.

Unger noted how inconsistent findings are with regard to psychological sex and gender difference.

As scientists psychologists need to look out for confounding variables. In classic science the psychologist assigns participants to a condition for an experiment, with sex and gender work people come into the study with their gender, there is no assignment. If we lived in a society where there was full gender equality then men and women would have the same experiences, we do not live in such a society. We need to watch out for these confounding variables.


Psychologists need to eliminate expectancy effects. People have an idea of gender differences (probably a stereotypical idea), psychologists need to, at least, not reinforce these, and ideally remove them through a standard script for all participants.

Over time many of these effects have been minimised or eliminated in psychological sex and gender work.

The other thing Unger suggested was that we distinguish between psychological sex differences, which are understood to have a root in biology, and psychological gender differences, with a root in society.

Meta Analysis

From  1974 on psychologists have turned to meta analysis to try to understand the underlying trend behind inconsistent findings with regard to sex and gender. The various meta analyses have suggested that for most areas of psychology differences between men and women are so small as to have no real world effect. However, the number of psychological studies using the difference between men and women as something of interest have multiplied. So what tends to happen now is that people will do a meta analysis of a particular thing (e.g. language use). Hyde's 2005 paper was an attempt to give an overview of all these meta analyses.

Inconclusion

Perhaps at some point we will find sex and gender differences of the scale that stereotypes predict. We are not there at the moment.

Perhaps it is the very act of removing social influence from the laboratory that means we do not detect such differences currently.

Perhaps people (including psychologists) are so convinced that such differences exist that they refuse to acknowledge the evidence.

Reading

Else-Quest, N., Hyde, J., & Linn, M. (2010). Cross-national patterns of gender differences in mathematics: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 103-127. doi:10.1037/a0018053
Hegarty, P., & Buechel, C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004. Review of General Psychology, 10(4), 377-389. 
Hyde, J. S. (2005). The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.377

Marecek, J. (2001). After the facts: Psychology and the study of gender. Canadian Psychology/psychologie Canadienne, 42(4), 254-267. doi:10.1037/h0086894

Petersen, J., & Hyde, J. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993-2007. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 21-38. doi:10.1037/a0017504

Tyson, P. J., Jones, D., & Elcock, J. (2011). Psychology in social context. [electronic resource] : issues and debates. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K: BPS Blackwell (Chapter 5)

Unger, R. (1979). Toward a redefinition of sex and gender. American Psychologist, 34(11), 1085-94.