Center for Distance and Independent Study
Psychology 4830: Psychology of Women

Commentary

Welcome to the study of the psychology of women! I hope that you find this course as interesting as I do. This course is meant to be for everyone, and each person will take something different from it based on their personal experiences. I hope that you find this course to be both enjoyable and challenging. My goals are for you to gain a new perspective on women, a more critical eye when reading scientific research and consuming popular media, and an improved ability to express yourself in writing. I know that is a lot to accomplish, but you can do it. It's my goal to help bring this course to life as much as I can, and to inspire or renew enthusiasm for this topic. Let's get started!

As you begin your studies you may be wondering why we need to specifically study the psychology of women. Why not the psychology of men?  Or simply the psychology of people?  Historically, most psychology has been the psychology of men. The idea that men are somehow the standard version of humankind and that women are a variant of men, known as androcentrism, is deeply rooted in our culture (think of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve). However, androcentrist perspectives don't lead to good science. It was not until women began conducting psychological research in the late 1800s that people began to question many naive assumptions about women. Today, the psychology of women is an important area of study because we still lack knowledge about many of the experiences women share that men do not. Menstruation, childbirth, motherhood, and menopause are among the most salient of these experiences. Unfortunately, women are also more likely to experience rape, domestic violence, and sexism. It is important to understand the effects of these experiences.

The psychology of men is an equally valid field of study and deserves similar attention. Like women, men have a unique psychological experience and face unique challenges. Fatherhood, a masculine culture that restricts emotional expression, and even hormonal fluctuations are some of the important factors that deserve study. The psychology of men and the psychology of women should be complementary fields that acknowledge that the sexes experience the world in different ways. Although we will focus on women in this course, it is important to know that by doing so we are not devaluing men's experiences.

Who Are Feminists?

Are you a feminist? Take a minute to think about it. Who are feminists, exactly? Your personal answer to this question probably has a big influence on whether you consider yourself to be one. Odds are good that whether you think of yourself as a feminist or not, you share many of the core beliefs of feminism. In preparing to write this class, I asked my mother whether she was a feminist. "No," she said, wagging her finger at me jokingly, "And you shouldn't call yourself one either."  This struck me as quite funny coming from a strong-willed and smart woman who occupies several powerful leadership positions in her community. After I finished laughing, I asked her why she would say that. She said that the word "feminist" conjured up images of "man-hating hippies burning their bras."  My mother smiled and said, "I don't hate men, I love men."  She went on to say that she supports equal rights for women but wishes that there were another word for it other than "feminism."  This got me thinking, and I began to ask many of my friends and relatives whether they were feminists. I was surprised to learn that about half of them did not identify themselves as feminists, mostly because they associated the term with things other than the desire for women to have equal rights and treatment. Several said that feminists were "man-haters"; one even said that feminists were "woman-haters" because they "despise feminine dress and makeup."  Several friends said that feminists "looked-down on" stay-at-home mothers. In addition, one stated that she could never be a feminist because she was pro-life. Yet each of them, without prompting, stated that they believed in equal rights and equal pay for women.

This is very consistent with the basic definition of a feminist as a person (male or female) who believes that women have value and deserve to achieve equality with men. As you can tell, there are many negative stereotypes about feminists, (the cartoon on page 9 of your textbook does a great job illustrating this), but most of these are untrue. You really can't tell a feminist by his or her outside appearance. Feminists come in both genders, all races, ages, religions, and political affiliations. Your textbook discusses several subtypes of feminism, and these are important to know. But in the lessons I will use the term feminist broadly, to refer to anyone who believes that women and men are equally valuable and deserve equal treatment.

Exploration Exercise

This exercise is intended to get you thinking about feminism, and to help you determine whether you are a feminist, and whether your friends and/or family members are feminists. This exercise is for your benefit only, so you do not need to submit your answers or findings to the Center.

1. Ask several friends and family members (male and female) whether they are feminists. At first, don't provide them with a definition of the term, but ask them to explain their position. Then give them the basic definition of feminism you learned from this class, and ask them if they are feminists by that definition. What did they say after the first question? What did they say when you gave them a definition? What did you learn?

2. Are you a feminist? Why or why not?

The History of the Women's Movement

First Wave

The first wave of the women's movement in the United States began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. The Seneca Falls Convention was planned by five women who had been part of the movement to end slavery: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Mary Ann McClintock, and Jane Hunt (don't worry about memorizing their names). The event was to take place in a local Methodist Church, and the women did not expect that it would be the critical event that it was. Hundreds of people attended the conference, including forty men. Stanton wrote a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions based on the Declaration of Independence that, among other things, asserted women's equality to men, and boldly proclaimed that women should gain the right to vote. The idea that women should vote was considered foolish and scandalous. The resolution stating that women should vote was passed only after much debate. The former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass is credited with convincing the crowd that they should support women's right to vote. One-hundred women and men signed the Declaration.

Of the female signers at the Seneca Falls Convention, only Charlotte Woodward lived to see women finally win the right to vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment.  However, it is notable that even long after women were legally granted the right to vote, social and family systems continued to make it difficult for women to exercise that right. In particular, women of color had many years to fight for access to the polls. Even today low-income inner city citizens (who are more likely to be African American) often have inadequate polling places and must wait in long lines to exercise their hard-won right to vote.

After the 19th amendment was passed, the United States went through a period of turmoil including the Great Depression and World War Two. Although women entered the job market at unprecedented levels to aid the war effort, the feminist movement slid into the background. In the 1950s, women (by choice or not) returned to the domestic sphere, and much emphasis was placed on the so-called feminine virtues of cooking, cleaning, looking pretty and keeping quiet. Even though it appeared on the surface that the 1950s had smothered the feminist movement, a strong resurgence was brewing.

Second Wave

The second wave of the women's movement began in the 1960s. One of the most pivotal moments in the history of womankind occurred in 1960: birth control pills became available. Now I know that today, the pill does not seem like a big deal. For most of you, birth control pills have always been available, and most of us have not given them much thought. However for the vast majority of human history, there was no reliable way for women to avoid unwanted pregnancies. It is hard to imagine today the hysteria and controversy that surrounded the release of birth control pills. There was widespread worry that freedom from the fear of pregnancy would lead to a literal orgy of irresponsible sexual behavior and ultimately cause the breakdown of marriage and the family. Obviously, this did not happen (although recently, similar claims have been made about the legalization of Plan B, an over-the-counter contraceptive designed to be taken shortly after unprotected sex). Many of the women who sought birth control pills were, in fact, very responsible married mothers who wished to limit the size of their families. Toward the end of the second wave, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that abortion was legal based on the protection to privacy provided by the 14th Amendment. Abortion continues to be a hot topic to this day, and we will discuss it in more detail later in the course.

The 1960s are often associated with the so-called sexual revolution. One of the revolutionary parts of this movement was the notion that women could want and enjoy sex. Prior to the sexual revolution, culture was rampant with myths of feminine sexuality stating that good women only engaged in sex after marriage, and then only to produce babies, not because it was pleasurable. Books such as The Joy of Sex and Sex and the Single Girl heralded the beginnings of a cultural shift in attitudes toward female sexuality. The sexual revolution led to big changes in how culture viewed female sexuality, but it created some new problems and left other problems unsolved. This will be discussed further in Lesson 7.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed. Among other things, this act prohibited employers from discriminating against employees or potential employees based on gender. Later chapters will discuss how beauty standards arose as a way to continue sex discrimination.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw the formal organization of many societies designed to raise awareness about women's issues and promote research and activism. The National Organization for Women was founded in 1966. Within science, the Association for Women in Psychology was formed in 1969, and The Society of the Psychology of Women in the American Psychological Association was formed in 1973.

Third Wave

We are now in the third wave of the women's movement. There has been a significant backlash against the second wave movement. Many women have disowned the term "feminism" and distanced themselves from the women's movement because they do not understand the movement or have been exposed to negative stereotypes.

Another challenge faced by the third wave of the women's movement is the idea that we have accomplished all there is to accomplish and that feminism is no longer relevant. However, women have not yet achieved equality to men. Women still earn less per hour for equal work in equivalent jobs compared to men. Women still face discrimination in the workplace, sexual harassment, rape, and a culture that disbelieves women who speak out about such things. We lack sufficient legislation supporting maternity leaves and breastfeeding. Even as women continue to enter the workplace, they are still responsible for the majority of housework and childcare. To top it off, everyday we are bombarded with countless media portrayals of women as stupid, emaciated sex objects. And that only refers to the state of womankind within the United States. In many countries women still lack the right to vote, or drive, or learn to read, or even to appear in public unescorted by a man. Many women do not have access to jobs which pay livable wages. Women in many countries have little or no access to family planning or medical care, even for childbirth. In some countries, fetuses are aborted and babies are killed simply because they are female. It is even considered honorable to brutally murder female family members when it is believed they have committed sexual transgressions. Shockingly, women are sometimes killed by their families after they have been raped, because the rape is considered to be the woman's fault. Here and around the world, there is still much work to be done!

Sexism

Sexism refers to discrimination or prejudice against people because of their gender. Both men and women can be perpetrators or targets of sexism, although it is more common for women to be targeted. There are several types of sexism. The most overt is hostile sexism. Hostile sexism refers to beliefs that men are superior to women, and that women are a threat to men and society as a whole. Benevolent sexism refers to beliefs about women that seem positive on the surface, but on a deeper level they serve to justify the second-class status of women. It is related to positive attitudes toward women who fit very traditional gender roles. Ambivalent sexism refers to the existence of hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs in the same person.

Your textbook discriminates between modern sexism and neosexism, but for the purposes of this course we will consider them to be the same thing. I'll refer to it as neosexism. Neosexism is a more subtle form of sexism based on the beliefs that women have already achieved equality, and that women who say otherwise are whining or trying to gain unfair advantage.

Most women acknowledge that sexism still exists, but many deny experiencing it themselves. This is referred to as denial of personal discrimination. It is possible that some women have never experienced it, or at least are unaware of sexism when confronted with it. Failure to recognize sexism is quite possible given the widespread negative messages about women present in our society. However, most women can identify at least one personal experience with sexism. Some of the more common experiences include grown women being referred to as 'girls' by people in positions of higher power. Similarly, women are sometimes called by their first names in situations where men are referred to by their title and last name. Even worse, it has recently become acceptable (even on primetime network television) to refer to women individually or collectively as "bitches."  This may seem cheeky or like a joke. But in truth it sends a negative message about women. One clue that it is more than a joke is that there is no parallel derogatory term used so freely for men. These forms of sexism may not seem that important, but they illustrate the imbalance in the power structure.

Can you think of a time when you have experienced or witnessed sexism?  One event in particular comes to my mind. About a year ago I received a call from a telemarketer. I answered the phone and a friendly sounding man asked to speak to the head of the household. I replied, "This is she."  The telemarketer said, "No, I want to speak to your husband."  I was shocked silent for a minute and then just hung up the phone. What type of sexism does this seem like?  Can you categorize the sexist incidents that you have witnessed or endured?

Legitimizing Myths

Legitimizing myths are attitudes or beliefs that are used to maintain the status of non-dominant groups. These myths are often so entrenched in our culture that we do not see them until we begin to look for them. Legitimizing myths are propagated through popular culture, religious stories, mythology, and symbolism.

One common myth about women is that they are the source of evil. In the Christian Bible, Eve committed the original sin by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Because Eve committed this sin she was punished with pain in childbirth and remanded to obey her husband. In Greek mythology, Pandora brought evil to mankind by opening a forbidden box. The myth of women as evil legitimizes the belief that women require male control to prevent them from wreaking havoc.

Another myth about women that legitimizes their oppression is that they are weak or helpless and therefore in need of male protection. This legitimizing myth is endlessly played out in mythology, cartoons, children's stories, popular movies, and video games. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White needed rescuing by their princes. Countless cartoons featured some pretty girl tied to railroad tracks. Many video games from my childhood were based on saving a princess. It is easy to see the relationship between this type of legitimizing myth and paternalistic prejudice, the belief that women need to be helped and protected by men.

Two common and seemingly contradictory myths are that women are pure and virginal and that women are "sluts."  The Virgin Mary is the archetype of the virginal myth. On the surface the view of women as pure, holy, and virginal may seem like a good thing. However, it legitimizes the notion that "good girls" do not desire or enjoy sex. This belief promotes benevolent sexist ideas about women, and can get in the way of healthy sexual relationships for women and for men. After all, if good girls do not enjoy sex, is a woman deviant if she does?  And if good girls don't enjoy sex, then why should men strive to please their partners sexually?  The pure, virginal woman myth is sharply contrasted with the myth that women are sexually insatiable, masochistic "sluts."  This myth is very prevalent, and very dangerous. It legitimizes sexual assault and sexual violence. Beliefs that women can be responsible for their own rapes, or that they desire and enjoy rape are legitimized and propagated by this myth.

Understanding Psychological Research

Before we can start to cover the many interesting topics in this course, I want to briefly go over some basic information about psychological research. There are two major types of research. The first type of research is called experimental research. This type of research uses experiments where one variable is manipulated and its effects on another variable are measured. The variable that the experimenter controls and changes is called the independent variable. The variable that is influenced or changed by the independent variable is called the dependent variable (because its value depends on the other variable). Researchers usually begin an experiment with a hypothesis. This is their prediction about the relationship between the variables. The following is an example that will make these concepts more interesting.

Let's say we're interested in how education about birth control options affects the likelihood of pregnancy in college women. Perhaps our hypothesis is that women who attend a seminar about birth control will be less likely to become pregnant in the next year than women who attend a similar seminar about growing houseplants. In this case the independent variable is which seminar women attended. The dependent variable is the number of pregnancies in each group of women over the next year. The group of women is our sample. It is important to recognize that our hypothesis is of crucial importance. The inherent biases of the hypothesis will influence the results and interpretation of the experiment. One clear bias of this experiment is the assumption that college women do not want to become pregnant, when in fact many women attending college already are or plan to become mothers.

You will often see statistical results referred to as significant or not significant. In this sense, the word "significant" doesn't refer to the importance of a finding. If a result is called statistically significant it means that there is a low probability of getting that result by chance alone. But this does not mean that is impossible for the result to be due to chance. When multiple studies show a significant relationship between two variables, this increases our confidence that the finding is real, but it still does not tell us that it is important.

Although the word "significant" in research studies generally refers to statistical significance, clinical significance is another important idea. Something that is clinically significant is meaningful or important. So a result can be statistically significant, but not clinically significant. What if a researcher with grant money to burn chooses to study whether men and women differ in their preferences for red or yellow snow cones. Suppose she found that men were more likely to choose yellow snow cones than women. Although statistically significant, the result was not clinically significant. It just doesn't have any important implications (that I can think of, anyway). Generally, a result should be statistically significant in order to be considered clinically significant, but in some cases a finding that is just shy of statistical significance is treated as clinically significant. For example, if women were slightly more likely than men to have life threatening side effects after taking a heart medication, this may be considered highly clinically significant even if it falls short of statistical significance.

The second type of research is correlational research. Correlational research examines existing relationships; no variables are manipulated or changed by the researchers. Most survey research is correlational. Suppose we were interested in the relationship between number of children and income in young women. We could give women a survey and ask them to list their number of children and their monthly income. Then we could look at our data and determine whether there was a relationship between number of children and monthly income. We could compute a correlation coefficient. This is a statistic that tells us the degree to which two variables vary with each other (how much they are co-related). A correlation coefficient ranges from negative one to one, though it is rare to obtain a correlation of exactly -1.0, 0.0 or 1.0. A correlation of 0.0 means that there is no relationship between the variables. A correlation of 1.0 means that as one variable increases the other increases with it perfectly. Suppose we obtained a correlation of .84 between number of children and monthly income. This would mean that as the number of children increases, monthly income also increases. A correlation of -1.0 means that as one variable goes up the other goes down perfectly. Suppose our study had a correlation of -.84 between number of children and income. This would mean that as number of children increases income decreases. The positive or negative on a correlation only tells us about the direction of the relationship, not the strength. So our correlation of -.84 is just as strong as the correlation of .84. It is very important for you to know that a correlation does not tell us anything about which variable causes changes in the other variable. We absolutely cannot say that number of children causes changes in income, or that income causes people to have a certain number of children.

Practice Questions

The practice questions will help you review this lesson and prepare for the progress evaluation. Answer these questions as best you can and then compare your answers to the suggested responses. The practice questions are for your benefit only, so you will not submit your answers to the Center.

1. Suppose we did a study with adolescent girls and found a correlation of .45 between amount of time spent reading fashion magazines and number of eating disorder symptoms. What would this mean?
   
   This would mean that as time spent reading fashion magazines increases, the number of eating disorder symptoms also increases.

2. Imagine a study of elderly women found a correlation of -.17 between frequency of sexual activity and self-ratings of depression. What would this mean?
   
   This would mean that as frequency of sexual activity increases, self-ratings of depression decrease.
3. Imagine that we found a correlation of 0.0 between weight and IQ in adult women. What does this mean?
   
   This would mean that there is no relationship between weight and IQ in adult women.

Bias in Research

Theories and Hypotheses

There are a several ways that bias can creep into psychological research, and it is important to understand these in order to intelligently evaluate published psychological studies. One of the most basic ways is when there is bias in the theoretical model. Sigmund Freud's notion of penis envy is one of the most famous sex-biased theoretical models. This theory suggested (in a nutshell) that when young girls discover that they do not have a penis, they blame their mothers for castrating them. This anger at the mother leads them to fall in love with their fathers. They are intensely jealous of men's penises and want to find a way to obtain a penis. One way of doing this would be to sexually possess their fathers, but they clearly cannot do this. So in adulthood, healthy women eventually resolve this conflict by marrying a man and having a child, because a child is somehow an acceptable substitute for a penis. Thankfully, no one really subscribes to this theory anymore. But think about what kinds of research we would conduct if we used this theory as our starting point.

Clearly, biased theories can lead to biased hypotheses and biased research questions. Bias in topics selected for research is largely invisible, but exceptionally important. For instance, there are many studies about how women's work outside the home may affect their children. However, there are very few studies about how men's work outside the home may affect their children. Why?  It reflects underlying assumptions about women—that their primary role is motherhood. It also reflects the inherent idea that fatherhood is not as important as motherhood.

Study Design

Selecting a sample, or group of participants in a study, is an important step that can lead to bias in research. In selecting a sample, researchers generally want to be able to extend their research findings to the population, or entire group from which the sample came. Therefore, participants need to be selected in a way that maximizes the chances that they will be similar to the population of interest (or representative). So, if we are interested in studying the academic achievement of seventh grade girls in Iowa, we might study a sample of 500 girls from five middle schools in the state and assume that our results apply to the population of all seventh grade girls. However, let's say we are conducting our research at a University in a big city, and for the sake of convenience we decide to get our sample from schools close to the University. If we do this, our sample will not reflect the population of all 7th graders in Iowa. Our sample will only contain children from the city near the University. These girls are likely to come from more educated and higher income families than children from rural areas or from parts of the city not near the University. Ideally, we should design the study in a way that allows us to gain a representative sample. If we do not do this, we at least need to acknowledge that the study may not be representative. Similar to this example, much research is done on college students. This rightly provokes the critique that psychology is becoming the science of middle-class, white, nineteen-year-olds.

The research design and measures used in a study may be sex biased. The content of the measures, instruments, or tasks used in a study can be biased toward one gender. For example, what if an investigator had subjects select clothing to be used in a fictional advertisement under a timed condition. Women may excel at this task relative to men because the skill of matching clothing and assembling outfits is generally fostered in women more than in men. We could not take the results from this study to say that men are poorer at timed tasks than women. The ability to create matched outfits is a sex-biased measurement. However, exactly this sort of thing has occurred with male-typical tasks used as a standard.

Even if a study is conducted in a gender-neutral manner, bias can still occur in the interpretation of the results. One of the most common ways this occurs is when gender differences are interpreted to reflect female deficits. For example, suppose we conduct a study of negotiating skills, and pair men and women. In the study, we find that men were less likely to accept their negotiating partners' proposals than women. This could be interpreted to mean that men are superior negotiators because they yield less ground. Alternately, it could be interpreted to suggest that females excel at negotiation because they are more adept at compromise and handling adversarial interpersonal situations. It is very important to consider multiple interpretations of research. No matter how good the science may be, a faulty interpretation can render a study nearly worthless.

Publication and Publicity

There may also be bias in whether results are published and publicized. A paper with results that suggest sex-differences in some trait is probably more likely to get published than a paper that shows no sex-differences. Research that shows sex-differences is also more likely to get publicity in the popular press. Studies that show that men and women are similar just don't make the nightly news. For example, a few years ago I was an author on a paper about hangover. The paper was a broad investigation of hangover in college students, and focused on the validity of a hangover scale. A minor finding of the study was that women are more likely to experience hangover than men when controlling for the quantity of alcohol consumed. This was not the main point of the study. However, this result was picked up by the major news media, and appeared in many newspapers and even on CNN. It is important to know that the science that shows up in the news is not necessarily the whole story.