The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

60 Chapter 2

perceivers, create gender by our expectations,

by our behavior, and by what we decide to in-

clude in this category. As you will see, there

is support for the social constructionist view-

point. The studies reviewed in Chapter 4 that

compare men and women on a number of

domains lead to the conclusion that the situa-

tion, the context, has a large influence on the

size of any differences that appear between

women and men.

Gender-Role Strain. By viewing gender

as a social category, researchers paid greater

attention to the influence of society on the

nature of gender roles. One outgrowth of

this recognition was research ongender-

role strain,a phenomenon that occurs when

gender-role expectations have negative con-

sequences for the individual. Gender-role

strain is likely to occur when gender-role ex-

pectations conflict with naturally occurring

tendencies or personal desires. An uncoordi-

nated male or an athletic female may experi-

ence gender-role strain in physical education

classes. A male who wants to pursue dance

or a woman who does not want to have chil-

dren also may suffer some gender-role strain.

Joseph Pleck (1995) describes two theo-

ries of gender-role strain.Self-role discrep-

ancy theorysuggests that strain arises when

you fail to live up to the gender role that so-

ciety has constructed. This describes the man

who is not athletic, the man who is unem-

ployed, the woman who is not attractive, and

the woman who does not have children.So-

cialized dysfunctional characteristic theory

states that strain arises because the gender

roles that society instills contain inherently

dysfunctional personality characteristics. For

example, the male gender role includes the

inhibition of emotional expression, which

is not healthy; similarly, the female gender

role includes dependency, which also may

DO GENDER 2.2

Conceptions of Masculinity

and Femininity

Construct your own categories of mascu-

linity and femininity by asking 20 people,

10 women and 10 men, to describe a mas-

culine person and a feminine person and

consider the following questions in their

descriptions.

1. What does a masculine (feminine)
   man (woman) look like?


2. What personality traits does a
   masculine (feminine) man (woman)
   possess?


3. How does a masculine (feminine)
   man (woman) behave?


4. What is a masculine (feminine)
   man (woman) interested in?


5. What does a masculine (feminine)
   man (woman) think about?
   List all the features mentioned, and
   construct a frequency distribution for each
   feature. Identify the most frequently named
   features and indicate what percentage of
   your respondents named each feature.
   To make your study more interesting,
   focus on a specific group of people you think
   are underrepresented in this research. You
   might choose children, the elderly, people
   of a minority race such as Asian Americans,
   Hispanic Americans, or African Americans,
   or people of a unique occupation. Then
   compare the responses you receive to those
   described in the text. Use only one target sex,
   female or male, so you can compare the re-
   sponses you receive to those in this text.

the diversity of human experience and view

gender as the effect of an interaction rather

than the cause of the interaction. We, the

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