Gender Bias

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Gender Bias

In psychology, there seems to be a bias towards females, leading to the misinterpretation of women. For example in experimental studies, the performance of the participants tends to be influenced by the expectations of the investigator. People have lower expectations for women; therefore we collect data showing lower task performance for them.

Two people who have investigated gender bias in psychological research are Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1988). They give two forms of gender bias; firstly Alpha Bias which is the tendency to exaggerate differences between the sexes and Beta Bias, this is the tendency to minimise or ignore differences between the sexes.

It has appeared to be that alpha bias is more popular in western cultures. For example Freud said that a child's superego develops when they identify with their parent of the same sex. Boys identify with their father more than daughters identify with their mother resulting in boys developing the stronger superego. Hoffman disagreed with this theory saying that there was no significant difference in the behaviours of boy and girls and also found that girls in fact are much better at resisting temptation. Also Freud only studied middle-class Viennese women