Evaluation of Gender Bias

⦁ Gender-based research may create misleading assumptions about female behaviour, fail to challenge negative stereotypes and validate discriminatory practices.

⦁ It may provide a scientific 'justification' to deny women opportunities within the workplace or in wider society.

⦁ Anywhere in which men set the standard of normalcy, it becomes normal for women to feel abnormal (Tavris 1993).

⦁ Thus, gender bias in research is not just a methodological problem but may have damaging consequences which affect the lives and prospects of real women.

⦁ A lack of women appointed at senior research level means that female concerns may not be reflected in the research questions asked.

⦁ Male researchers are more likely to have their work published and studies which find greater differences are more likely to appear in journal articles than those that do not.

⦁ Also, the laboratory experiement many further disadvantage women.

⦁ Female participants are placed in an unequitable relationship with a usually male researcher who has the power to label them unreasonable, irrational and unable to complete complex tasks (Nicolson 1995).

⦁ This means that psychology may be guilty of supporting a form of institutional sexism that creates bias in theory and research (Denmark et al. (1988).

⦁ Many modern researchers are beginning to recognise the effect of their own values and assumptions have on the nature of their work.

⦁ Rather than seeing such bias as a problem that may threaten the objective status of their work, they embrace it as a crucial and critical aspect of the research process in general.

⦁ For instance, in their study of the lack of women in executive positions in accountancy firms, Dambrin and Lambert (2008) include reflection on how their gender-related experiences influence their reading of events.

⦁ Such reflexivity is an important development in psychology and may lead to greater awareness of the role of personal bias in shaping research in the future.

⦁ Many of the gender differences reported by psychologists over the years are based on essentialist perspective: that the gender difference in question is inevitble and fixed in nature.

⦁ Walkerdine (1990) reports how, in the 1930's, 'scientific' research revealed how intellectual activity - such as attending university - would shrivel a woman's ovaries and harm her chances of giving birth.

⦁ Such essentialist accounts are often politically motivated arguments disguised as biological 'facts'.

⦁ This often creates a 'double-standard' in the way that the same behaviour is viewed from a male and female perspective.

⦁ Feminist commentators such as Judith Worrell (1992) have put forward a number of criteria that should be adhered to in order to avoid gender bias in research.

⦁ Women should be be studied within meaningful real-life contexts, and genuinely participates in research, rather than being objects of the study.

⦁ Diversity within groups of women should be examined, rather than comparisons made between men and women.

⦁ Finally, there should be a greater emphasis placed on collaborative research methods that collect qualitative, as opposed to numerical data.