Blogging Gender and Sexuality

As some of you know I intend this to be my last term working at the University of Gloucestershire before I retire. My favourite bit of teaching is my final year module, currently called Gender and Sexuality, although a very similar module called Sex and Gender preceeded it.


So that the module is not lost forever, and given that I am unlikely to write any more academic texts, I have decided to blog the module. Basically each week once term starts I will write a blog post about that teaching session.

In this post I am going to write about the major themes of the module.

The module is over 20 years old, starting its life as the Psychology of Sex and Gender, over that time most of material taught has changed although it has always had a similar structure, a few weeks of more theoretical material, followed by looking at some of the applied areas, a mixture of psychology professions and other concerns.

Some major themes

The quest for difference

For over a hundred years psychologists have been failing to find consistent, large, stable, psychological differences between men and women when they do laboratory experiments. At the same time there are plenty of differences, often contradictory, in one off experiments. Using meta-analysis and looking over time some differences between men and women that could be found in the laboratory appear to be getting smaller. This session attempts to understand this, and why after a hundred years of effort people are not happy to follow the data.

Attempting to categorise

Psychologists seem to love trying to find differences between groups of people. In order to do that it needs to establish categories of people. While some recent research suggests that (some) people shift in their sexual appetites across their lives binary categorisations remain remain popular. In recent history, and currently, a great deal of damage has been done to people who do not fit in with the accepted categories, and the accepted categories have changed across time.

Critical theories

Feminist psychology and social constructionism. There is a long standing strand of feminist psychology that has investigated how to make a science of psychology better with regard to understanding sex and gender. For over 40 years these researchers have been using meta-analysis to try to understand the contradictory laboratory experiments. At the same time they have been making suggestions on how to make laboratory experiments better, annoyingly other psychologists ignore these suggestions and continue to produce garbage research.

Another strand of feminist psychologists, and other social constructionists, question the whole experimental enterprise, and suggest we try to understand why sex & gender, and sexuality, are so important in current society.

Practical impacts

Being the object of discrimination is damaging. Believing that there are a narrow set of behavioural expectations can also be damaging. More women than men attract a diagnosis of depression, more men than women commit suicide. Stereotypes of men and women fit in with the idea that men are better leaders. Should we worry about the attainment gap in education between women and men. Is evolutionary psychology just a scientific gloss on top of current discriminatory practices. These are the sorts of issues I will write about in the coming weeks.

So I invite you to have a look at some of the current understandings of the psychology of gender and sexuality.

Not quite made my mind up if I am going to try to write this in the days just before the lecture, or just after the lecture. Teaching term starts Monday 17th September.