Feminist Psychology

Feminism and Psychology

So my argument is at follows. When we do work on men and women in the laboratory (or by properly sampled surveys) we persistently fail to find psychological differences. Yet there are clearly differences between men and women in society, some of which we can expect to affect psychology, or be affected by psychology, from the education gender gap, the gender pay gap, differences in diagnosis rate for the medicalised versions of psychological distress. All of this speaks to me of a need for tools beyond empirical measurement.

There are a variety of such tools available to social science, and I am going to look at three of them over the next few weeks, Feminism this week, theories of masculinity next week, and my historical version of social constructionism the week after.

Of those I find feminist psychology the hardest to teach, because I am constantly struck by the issue that the majority of my students are female and I am male; am I mansplaining feminism?

I have also failed to find any music that appeals enough to me to want to play it in class, but I do have distant memories of listening to the Au Pairs.

After some time I settled on a way of teaching this material by teaching about feminist psychologists. This also gives me a way to celebrate some voices that are often missing from the history of psychology. If you are interested in that then this website is amazing. Also where I got a lot of the biographic information from.

I begin the lecture talking about the various 'waves' of feminism.

Helen Thompson Woolley

Gained her PhD in psychology at the University of Chicago  in 1900. She was working at a time when women were largely dismissed.

W.L.Distant "modern, domesticated women, like Mr. Darwin's rabbits, were frailer and dumber than either their primitive ancestors or their contemporary mates”

William James claimed that women before motherhood as "vain, egotistic, irritable, and nervous" but, "instantly transformed when they have a baby. They become totally selfless, no longer need sleep, function unconsciously and intuitively, find absolute delight in their hideous infants”

I do not know if it was intentional but that description of women James used is very similar to descriptions of hysteria, more of that in a few weeks.

Woolley's work failed to find large scale differences between men and women, but was dismissed at the time.

The meta analytical tradition

I have already talked about this, two week ago. Most of the women who created meta analysis were feminist psychologists, Maccoby & Jacklin, and Hyde & Linn.

They had the hope that if they could find the 'real' differences between men and women then they could try to explain the stereotypes. However, as I have already discussed they found very few 'real' differences. 

Also their work (still on going) did not have the impact one might have imagined, areas that the evidence suggests have no differences still attract current peer reviewed journal articles. It is almost as if people only look for recent papers that back up their point of view when they do the literature review.

Sandra Bem

Bem's (June 22, 1944 – May 20, 2014) career is illustrative of how, at least some, feminist thinking within psychology changed across time.

She begins by suggesting that both men and women have masculine and feminine traits, and the most mentally healthy people have higher levels of both (Psychological Androgyny). This does break up the old status quo that masculine and feminine are opposites. BUT she later repudiates the test, after some scholarly discussion about what it means. However, the BSRI continues to be used, quite why modern researcher think measuring 1970s stereotypes about men and women is useful escapes me. This is quite good as an informal discussion of the problems of trying to use it today.

She then develops the Gender Schema idea. I saw this in the syllabus for last years GCSE psychology, so I think it had an impact. While doing that work she becomes increasingly concerned with why society invests so much into the idea that men and women are opposites, the idea she calls the Gender Polarizing Lens.

Rhoda Unger

One of figures whose work centres on making psychology a better science. Ironically though by making sure that psychologists are careful about removing (unwanted) social influence in the laboratory we just end up with the dilemma I talked about in the first week. Unger's (1979) work if it had been listened to more widely would have meant there was no need for Fine's critique of neuro-psychological sex and gender work.

The F Word

 There does  seem to be some reluctance to listen to criticism, especially when that criticism comes from people who self identify as feminist psychologists, or feminists more generally. 

While there are feminist psychologists who attack the very idea of a scientific practice of psychology, many argue for doing science, while also exploring the nature of society.

Next week Masculinity! How psychologists and others have tried to study what makes men, men.