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Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender

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Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology

Abstract

This chapter discusses the influence of ideological bias in the psychological study of sex and gender, with a focus on academic psychology. After introducing the essence of the problem, the chapter examines the conceptual distinction between “sex” and “gender,” the binary nature of biological sex, and the challenges to the idea of a sex binary. The following sections provide a survey of recent introductory textbooks and generalist journals, as well as a historical overview of sex and gender in psychology from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The chapter ends with a consideration of the current state of the field, its future prospects, and suggestions to limit the growing influence of ideological bias in relation to sex and gender.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    So-called difference feminism has been out of fashion since the late 1990s and did not necessarily accept biological explanations of sex differences. Of course, one can be an equal-opportunity feminist while believing that some sex differences in behavior and cognition have a strong biological basis and contribute to determine enduring differences in social outcomes. But this viewpoint has virtually no traction on present-day feminism, which—especially in academia—is moving toward increasingly extreme versions of social constructionism (see, e.g., Else-Quest & Hyde, 2018; Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020).

  2. 2.

    For a revealing example, consider the reactions to James Damore’s now-infamous “memo” on sex differences in tech jobs (Damore, 2017; see Anomaly & Winegard, 2020).

  3. 3.

    Parts of this section are adapted from Del Giudice (2020).

  4. 4.

    Species with simultaneous hermaphroditism (mostly plants and invertebrates) do not have distinct sexes, since any individual can produce both types of gametes at the same time.

  5. 5.

    The Noba Project textbook is a collection of stand-alone chapters, each written by different authors. Sexual selection was discussed in the chapter on evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2020), but not in the one on gender, which took a decidedly social-constructionist approach (Brown et al., 2020).

  6. 6.

    I completed this survey on November 9, 2020, and included advance publication papers that were online at that time.

  7. 7.

    One additional paper (Webermann & Murphy, 2020) offered recommendations to reduce “gender-based violence and misconduct on college campuses.” Since this paper had a strictly applied focus and did not deal with basic research on sex and gender, I excluded it from the survey.

  8. 8.

    The issue of greater male variability in intellectual abilities has a long and contentious history, which I address later in the chapter.

  9. 9.

    More precisely, Martin and Slepian (2020) mixed ideas about evolved psychological mechanisms from evolutionary psychology with the socialization account of social role theory (Eagly & Wood, 2012, 2016; see below). The result is a strangely incoherent theory, according to which (a) humans possess evolved, deeply ingrained, and stable gender schemas about typical masculine vs. feminine behaviors; but (b) masculine and feminine behaviors themselves are mainly shaped by socialization and malleable to the point that they can be changed with subtle linguistic interventions (e.g., relabeling assertive and competitive behaviors from “masculine” to “agentic” should help women become more competitive in the workplace).

  10. 10.

    The meta-analysis by Kugler et al. (2018) found that sex differences in the initiation of negotiation (a behavior that is thought to contribute to gender inequalities) were “small” by conventional statistical criteria (for a detailed critique of conventional criteria for effect sizes, see Del Giudice, 2020). As I noted above, this is usually a preferred outcome—but not when differences are presented as evidence of discrimination. Indeed, the authors went to some length to explain that even small effects can cumulate over time and give rise to large differences in outcomes—a reasonable argument, but one that is rarely brought up in the literature on “gender similarities” (e.g., Hyde, 2005, 2014; but see Zell et al., 2015).

  11. 11.

    In a recent video interview (October 10, 2019; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPsXpDIE0LA), Alice Eagly claimed that she had never denied the existence of sexually selected differences in psychological traits, but had simply chosen to emphasize the role of socialization. This is a transcript of the segment (starting at 17:56):

    They [the evolutionary critics] put words in my mouth that I never said! I never said there weren’t such influences. It’s merely that I emphasized others that they forget about. So I would not claim that there are no such effects of prenatal androgenization or sexual selection or whatever, but the force of my work has been to show that there are other influences, and we need to get it all together.

    This will come as a surprise to the many scholars who have used SRT precisely to discount the role of sexual selection and other biological factors. But the interview does raise the question of what SRT actually says in this regard. Re-reading the key papers presenting the theory, I could not find a single passage explicitly stating that psychological sex differences can be explained by sexual selection, though I did find a number of passages suggesting the opposite (e.g., Eagly & Wood, 1999, p. 415; Eagly & Wood, 2016, p. 464). Wood and Eagly (2012) came closest to accepting an organizational role for prenatal androgens, but described the evidence as equivocal and concluded that “[a]lthough sex-differentiated social experience surely does not operate on a blank slate, what is written on that slate has not been adequately deciphered so far” (p. 67). Throughout the chapter, they discussed how socialization may affect hormonal regulation, but not how hormonal differences may modulate social interactions (note that, in their Figure 1, socialization factors affect hormonal regulation, but not vice versa). Similarly, Wood and Eagly (2000) stated “[…] we recognize that such biological factors [hormones] work in concert with psychological processes involving social expectations and self-concepts to yield sex differences in behavior” and seemed to endorse “a feedback model in which testosterone affects socially dominant behavior and is in turn affected by such behavior and its outcomes.” My conclusion is that Eagly and Wood hedged their bets on the role of sex hormones; their writing on this issue invites a deflationary reading, but remains open to alternative interpretations (see also Eagly, 2018). On the other hand, as far as I can tell, these authors always portrayed SRT as an alternative to sexual selection on psychological traits, rather than a complementary explanation.

  12. 12.

    I recommend the Denmark et al. chapter as a counterpoint to my “revisionist” account. For a less biased history of the field, see Chapter 2 in Blakemore et al. (2009).

  13. 13.

    The authors checked 600 entries for each topic as reported in the Psychological Abstracts. Google Scholar returns 1810 results for “interpersonal attraction” between 1953 and 1973 (searched on November 11, 2020). If one third of them was reported in the Abstracts, that would amount to about 600 entries.

  14. 14.

    Combined data from Tables 1 and 2 in McKenna and Kessler (1977).

  15. 15.

    McKenna and Kessler cited a paper by Carlson and Carlson (1960), who examined 298 human studies published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology between 1958 and 1960. They found that 36% of the studies included participants of both sexes and that 30% of those studies reported statistical tests of sex differences. There was no information about the proportion of studies that reported descriptive statistics for both sexes without performing a test (and vice versa).

  16. 16.

    Needless to say, there are a lot of incorrect or outdated statements in the book, and some ideas of the time (e.g., the recurring distinction between “higher” and “lower” races) have definitely not aged well. But readers familiar with current research on sex differences will be struck by how many issues Ellis managed to get approximately right, despite the limited data and conceptual tools available at the time.

  17. 17.

    Note that Ellis was talking about differences in relative brain mass, after adjusting for differences in body mass or size. Ellis spent several pages (pp. 95–101) reviewing alternative ways to make this adjustment and considering their limitations. In contrast with Ellis’ conclusions, the recent evidence shows that men have a larger brain even controlling for body size (e.g., Ankney, 1992; Ritchie et al., 2018).

  18. 18.

    Neuroticism/emotional stability is one of the personality traits showing the largest and most robust differences between men and women. Sex differences become even larger in more gender-egalitarian countries, a finding that would have surprised even Ellis (see Mac Giolla & Kajonius, 2019; Schmitt et al., 2017).

  19. 19.

    Unfortunately, the sample was very small (25 men and 25 women), so the results were far less reliable than assumed at the time. For example, Woolley failed to detect any sex differences in emotion-related measures and used this finding to argue that women’s higher emotionality was a baseless stereotype (see below).

  20. 20.

    In particular, Woolley criticized Geddes and Thomson’s (1889) theory of the evolution of sex, a then-popular alternative to Darwin’s (1871) theory of sexual selection. Many biologists regarded sexual selection theory as dubious until it was formalized by Fisher (1930); in the meantime, there were several attempts to develop an alternative account of the evolution of males and females. Geddes and Thomson’s theory was one of those attempts, based on the opposition between anabolic and catabolic processes; in fairness to Woolley, there was plenty to be critical about.

  21. 21.

    For example, Edward Thorndike was an early advocate of the hypothesis (Thorndike, 1906); Lewis Terman initially argued against it, but changed his mind in his later work (see McNemar & Terman, 1936; Terman et al., 1946).

  22. 22.

    Then again, see Thorndike (1906) for a very different perspective on the same issue.

  23. 23.

    Shields (1975) recounts the same period in the history of psychology, but from the standard feminist assumptions that sex differences are largely socially constructed; that the variability hypothesis (like other biological explanations) was only accepted because it justified women’s subordination; that the idea of an evolved “maternal instinct” is nothing but a subtly oppressive fiction; etc. From this vantage point, everything looks much darker. But even then, there is no ground for the narrative that “all psychology was the psychology of men”; and the contributions of Hollingworth, Woolley, and other feminist psychologists were not marginalized, but published in top journals, widely discussed, and accepted by many in the discipline.

  24. 24.

    Few know that the term “evolutionary psychology” was not coined in the 1990s (e.g., Barkow et al., 1992), but was already in use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See, for example, Stanley (1895), Howard (1927), and Jastrow (1927). For a historical overview, see Gillette (2007).

  25. 25.

    To give just one example, Else-Quest and Hyde (2018) advocate a feminist approach to psychology and clearly note that “[f]eminism is a political movement and ideology as well as a theoretical perspective” (p. 7).

  26. 26.

    In fact, the questionnaire that is commonly used to measure sexism (the “ambivalent sexism inventory”; Glick & Fiske, 1996) is a textbook example of blatant ideological bias in psychology. Here are some sample items indicating “benevolent sexism”:

    • In a disaster, women ought not necessarily to be rescued before men (reverse-scored).

    • Women, as compared to men, tend to have a more refined sense of culture and good taste.

    • Women, compared to men, tend to have a superior moral sensibility.

    • No matter how accomplished he is, a man is not truly complete as a person unless he has the love of a woman.

    And some examples of “hostile sexism”:

    • Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men (reverse-scored).

    • Many women are actually seeking special favors, such as hiring policies that favor them over men, under the guise of asking for “equality.”

    • Women are too easily offended.

    • Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.

    The last item is especially ironic, considering that the questionnaire is full of arguably innocent remarks that are interpreted as indicators of sexism.

  27. 27.

    To be clear, I do not think this is necessarily a good thing. While evolutionary psychology may be quite effective at limiting the impact of researchers’ ideological biases (thanks to the “buffering” effect of strong theory; Tybur & Navarrete, 2018), more political diversity would almost certainly benefit the field and add another layer of protection against conformity and groupthink.

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Acknowledgments

Warm thanks to Romina Angeleri, Mike Bailey, David Geary, and Richard Lippa for their helpful and constructive comments.

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Correspondence to Marco Del Giudice .

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Del Giudice, M. (2023). Ideological Bias in the Psychology of Sex and Gender. In: Frisby, C.L., Redding, R.E., O'Donohue, W.T., Lilienfeld, S.O. (eds) Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29148-7_28

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