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Key Words sex differences, within-sex differences, social power, intersectionality
Abstract Gender is increasingly understood as defining a system of power relations embedded in other power relations. Psychological research on gender-which has most often focused on analysis of sex differences, within-sex variability, and gender roles-has begun to incorporate this new understanding. By drawing on three resources, psychologists can make more rapid progress in understanding gender's significance for psychological processes: social science theories that link the individual and social levels of analysis; constructs (such as identity) that bridge the social and individual levels; and conceptual tools generated in feminist theory, perhaps especially intersectionality. We review these resources, cite active research programs that have employed them, and conclude by offering some practical suggestions about how to incorporate these resources into our research.
GENDER IN PSYCHOLOGY
Gender is widely recognized to be an important empirical factor (or variable) in understanding many aspects of behavior. In psychology gender is often used empirically, without much consciousness of its social or conceptual significance. In this chapter we focus on the use of gender as an analytic tool in psychology. Of course analytic tools must prove empirically useful (or not), but recognizing the conceptual significance of different ways of using gender in empirical research can, we think, help psychologists identify newer and more powerful ways to use gender to study psychological phenomena. Ordinarily psychologists use gender in empirical research in at least three wholly different ways: to signify sex differences, within-sex variability, and the gender-linked power relations that structure many social institutions and interactions.
First, and perhaps still most often, gender is used to think about ways in which boys and girls or men and women differ. According to this "sex differences approach," psychologists consider how and why average differences in personality, behavior, ability, or performance between the sexes might arise (see, e.g., Block 1984, Buss 1995, Eagly 1994, Levy & Heller 1992, Maccoby & Jacklin 1974, and Maccoby 1998). This approach often appears to assume, or actually does assume, that these differences arise from preexisting "essential" differences between male and female human organisms. In its strongest form, the sex differences approach assumes not only will there be group differences between men and women on key traits but also nonoverlapping distributions. Early...