Evaluation of Gender Bias

Evaluation

Implications 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.

Sexism Within the Research Process

• 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…