The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender From Gender Differences to Doing Gender

Running head: ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 1 PREPUBLICATION DRAFT: to appear in Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2011 The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender: From Gender Differences to Doing Gender Stephanie A. Shields and Elaine C. Dicicco The Pennsylvania State University Author Note Stephanie Shields, Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University; Elaine Dicicco, Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University. We would like to thank Matthew Zawadzki, Jessica Cundiff, and Jean Lamont for comments on a preliminary version of this paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Stephanie A. Shields, Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. Email: [email protected] ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 2 The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender: From Gender Differences to Doing Gender The social psychology of gender is a major, if qualified, success story of contemporary feminist psychology. The breadth and intellectual vigor of the field is reflected in the following six commentaries in the broadly defined area of the Social Psychology of Gender which were commissioned for this third of four 35th anniversary sections to feature brief retrospectives by authors of highly-cited PWQ articles. Our goal in this section's introduction to is to provide a brief history of the development of this area, placing the articles described in the commentaries into this historical context. The six papers in this special section, individually and taken together, identify significant turning points in the social psychology of gender. We focus on how, within a few brief years, the study of gender in psychology underwent massive transformation.1 The social psychology of gender has grown to become a thriving, scientifically sound research theme that encompasses a wide variety of topics and questions. The story of how this came to be has been told from a number of perspectives (e.g., Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Deaux, 1999; Unger, 1998). Here we focus on how, from psychology of gender’s murky beginnings in early 20th century Freudian personality theory and even deeper roots in androcentric paternalism of 19th century science (Shields, 1975; Shields, 1982; Shields & Bhatia, 2009), feminist psychologists have shaped how sex and gender are scientifically defined, theorized, and studied. Over the course of the second half of the 20th century, feminist psychologists challenged psychology’s long-standing equation of female with defect and the psychology of gender with cataloging sex differences (Marecek, Kimmel, Crawford, & HareMustin, 2003; Rutherford, & Granek, 2010). We identify three intertwined streams of investigation from which the contemporary psychology of gender grew: (a) research focusing on gender identity as a feature of personality, ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 3 (b) research on behavioral sex differences, and (c) research on gender roles and the study of gender in social context. We interweave into this story how each of the six key papers highlighted in this special section illustrate turning points in that history. We then describe a factor that was critically important in making the research of those papers possible. We conclude with our thoughts on future directions in the social psychology of gender. First, though, we locate the perspective from which we each write. We come at this project from different ends of the career path. Elaine has just completed her first year in graduate school and is beginning to pursue a dual degree in social psychology and women’s studies. She is excited to become part of the feminist psychology community and contribute to its advancement. Stephanie did her graduate work in the early 1970s and has been deeply involved in feminist psychology throughout her entire career. Through thick and thin, she has kept faith in the potential of psychological science (broadly defined) to be a vehicle for promoting positive social change. Three Streams of Research Personality and gender identity. Sigmund Freud’s visit to the United States in 1909 (at G. Stanley Hall’s invitation) was a signal moment for both Freudian and American psychology. Although many American scientists were disdainful of Freud’s ideas, he found a culture receptive to his ideas about unconscious motivation and the structure of personality; and, in turn, US popular culture found a psychological theory that meshed with American sensibilities (Fancher, 2000; Lepore, 2011). One by-product of this love affair between Freud’s theory and U.S. popular and intellectual culture is the instant map of gender difference that came with it. The core idea was that male-female psychological differences were natural, deep-seated, and of profound personal and social consequence. This proposal easily built upon the already-accepted ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 4 Anglo-American belief in “natural” gender differences as differentiating “advanced” races from the more “primitive” (Shields & Bhatia, 2009). Furthermore, biological sex, gender identity, adherence to gender roles, and sexual orientation were considered monolithic, that is, completely consistent with one another in normal individuals. For example, the healthy and normal girl or woman identified herself as female, conformed to cultural expectations for appropriate feminine personality and demeanor, and was heterosexual. These ideas, of course, built on already prevailing beliefs and had long-term effects for how gender was studied by psychologists. The Freudian version of gender psychology held sway until feminist psychologists began to challenge academic and clinical psychologies' formulation of female nature in the 1960s. (Earlier challenges to a female-deficit model had come from within the psychoanalytic community, most notably by Karen Horney and Clara Thompson, but their theories are beyond the scope of this commentary.) Behaviorism, the dominant paradigm in U.S. academic psychology through most of the first half of the 20th century, was not concerned with individual differences (such as gender differences) or personality, which further pushed the psychology of women and gender under the Freudian umbrella. By that time, alternative views (e.g., Seward, 1946) and the work of feminist psychologists from earlier in the century (e.g., Calkins, 1896; Thompson [Woolley], 1903; Hollingworth, 1914; 1916; Tanner, 1896) had been written out of histories of psychology. The systematic search for stable enduring traits that unambiguously distinguish one sex psychologically from the other was an enterprise begun in earnest in the 1930s. The first masculinity/femininity (M/F) scale was developed by Lewis Terman and Catherine Cox Miles (1936), who were best known for research with high IQ children. The test comprised over 450 items related to gender-typed interests, opinions, and emotional reactions and was normed with ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 5 students in elementary and junior high school. The M/F scale proved impossible to validate against external criteria because it had low reliability and was uncorrelated with behavioral measures predicted to be related to it. Nevertheless, Terman argued the utility of the scale in revealing “existing differences in mental masculinity and femininity however caused” (Terman & Miles, p. 6). The impetus behind the research was the desire to create an assessment tool that could reliably detect a propensity for “sexual inversion” (in the language of psychology at the time) or homosexuality. The gay male was presumed to be psychologically feminine, and Terman and Miles wished to demonstrate that boys of high IQ were no more likely to be sexual inverts than other boys. We describe Terman and Miles’ (1936) project in some detail for two reasons. First, it inspired other attempts to measure M/F through participants’ endorsement of gender stereotypes, assuming that psychological gender was a deep-seated and enduring trait and was difficult to measure accurately without disguising the purpose of the test (Lewin, 1984a; 1984b; Morawski, 1987). Second, it uncovers the assumption that sexual orientation is revealed through endorsement of gender stereotypes and culturally-constructed gender roles. For example, the MMPI’s femininity scale was famously normed on a group of 13 homosexual men (Lewin, 1984b)! By the early-1970s, the assumption that masculinity and femininity (M/F) represented opposite anchors on a unidimensional, bipolar continuum was challenged by a new generation of feminist psychologists (Constantinople, 1973; Bem, 1974). The notion of psychological M/F as a unified trait-like feature of personality was retained, but now its elements (femininity and masculinity) were hypothesized to be orthogonal, each expressed on its own low to high continuum. Thus, an individual could be described as high or low F and high or low M. The ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 6 original aim of M/F tests − to identify gender inverts − was eclipsed by concerns with a new kind of psychological health − androgyny, that is, rating oneself as high on both positive stereotypical F and M attributes (e.g., Bem, 1981). Despite the patently sex-stereotypical content of M/F inventories, many embraced the view that the extent to which an individual is willing to describe herself or himself in terms of stereotypes is a legitimate indicator of healthy psychological gender (see Morawski, 1987, for an insightful critique). Just as Terman and Miles (1936) discovered 40 years earlier, these new M/F scales did not serve as good predictors of either gendered behavior or other dimensions of gender. In this anniversary section, Janet Spence’s (2011) overview of the course of her research vividly documents the shift from reliance on the personality approach (as reflected in the use of M/F scales) to a more complex conceptualization of gender. For example, early in her work on gender, Spence and her colleagues (Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1975) found that masculinity and femininity scores were uncorrelated, independent constructs and were therefore inappropriately represented as opposite ends of a single continuum. Later, she showed that higher masculinity scores were associated with higher self-esteem in both men and women, countering the idea that one needed to score highly on both the M and the F scales (considered to be “androgynous”) to be psychologically healthy (Spence & Helmreich, 1980). This study, and others that followed, revealed the multidimensionality of gender − that is, “gender” encompasses distinct factors that cannot be used to predict or make generalizations about gender-related attitudes or behaviors (Spence, 1993). Before we move to the second stream of research that contributed to present-day psychology of gender, we should make two additional points. First, John Money’s (e.g., Money & Erhardt, 1972) research on pre-and post-natal gender development also challenged a unified ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 7 trait-like view of gender and advanced the idea that sex should be differentiated from gender (Muelenhard, & Peterson, 2011). Money asserted that prenatal and postnatal gender differentiation had multiple influences; that sex of upbringing, not biology, dictated core gender identity (which he defined as the sense of oneself as female or male); and that sexual orientation and what he termed sex-coded role (gender role) were independent features of gender differentiation. Years later, Money was shown to be tragically wrong regarding the exclusive influence of nurture on core gender identity, having based his “evidence” on questionable ethical treatment of patients (Colapinto, 2006). That said, when initially published, his work appealed to feminist psychologists who were questioning the prevailing view of gender as the simple product of genes and hormones and who were theorizing the power of socialization in determining gendered beliefs, values, and behavior. (For example, see the popular textbook by Tavris and Offir, 1977.) Second, this history of conceptualizing “gender” as exclusively or primarily an aspect of personality masked the power of beliefs about gender in influencing people’s perception of, and expectations regarding, the behavior of themselves and others. Over the past 40-plus years. an abundance of research has demonstrated the structural complexity of gender stereotypes and their power to influence others’ perceptions (e.g., Eagly & Kite, 1987; Kite, Deaux, & Haines, 2008) and, in some circumstances, even recall of one’s own behavior (Robinson, Johnson, & Shields, 1998). Kite and Deaux (1987), for example, found that stereotypes of lesbians and gay men largely reflected the inversion model − lesbians as masculine; gay men as feminine − that had been the rationale for decades of M/F research (see Kite, 2011). Mary Kite and Kay Deaux also found that the stereotype of the gay man is not simply equivalent to the stereotype of ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 8 heterosexual women, nor is the stereotype of lesbians identical to the stereotype of heterosexual men. Their work was influential because it was an important early exploration of how intersections of homosexual/heterosexual and woman/man occupy distinctly different identity positions in people’s conceptualization of stereotypes. To this day, their study remains one of the few published that examines stereotype content of both gay women and men. (For a recent exception, see Lehavot, King, and Simoni, 2011, in this issue.) In her commentary, Kite (2011) also reminds us that intersections of sexual orientation and racial ethnicity have yet to be systematically examined by psychologists. Behavioral sex differences. Within psychodynamically tinted, gender-as-personality psychological research in the United States, empirical investigation of gender almost exclusively focused on behavioral sex differences. (There was also a thriving research stream devoted to women’s psychological disorders, especially if connected to the menstrual cycle or sexuality, such as “clitorid” versus “uterine” women [Meyers, 1966], but this tangent is beyond the scope of the present paper.) Browsing the psychological research literature published during the 1960s and onward reveals a growing number of themes relevant to the social psychology of gender. One theme is women and employment, ranging from women’s comparative fitness for work to the effects of employed mothers on their children (e.g., Nye & Hoffman, 1965). Most of this research. however, was conducted from a deficit perspective which presumed that individual employed women were responsible for figuring out how to balance the demands of work and family responsibilities. Jeanne Herman and Karen Gyllstrom’s (1977) paper on inter- and intra- role conflict, reconsidered by Brett (2011), was important in challenging the truism that women could not be good workers because of competing caregiving and domestic roles. They showed that it ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 9 was not gender, but the number of roles between home and work one had to juggle that determined perceived inter-role conflict − that is, women and men with children who worked full time reported similar amounts of role conflict. Their original question of the toll of work and family for women is one that reverberates today. For instance, mothers still face more challenges (Crosby, Williams, & Biernat, 2004) than fathers in the workplace – mothers are hired less frequently, are given lower salaries, and are less likely to be hired than fathers because mothers are seen as less committed to their job (Correll, Benard, & Paik 2007). In the 1970s, women were becoming a serious presence in American psychology graduate programs because of legal changes such as clarifications of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX (1972) that prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex at any educational program receiving federal funds. Many of these women students identified as feminists, and they pointed out (as had an earlier generation of feminist psychologists) that socialization and societal expectation, not simply biology, were important in understanding why and how gender differences are produced. An excellent example of this theme is Jacquelynne Eccles’ work (1987; 1994), which exemplifies how theory is made stronger when the question shifts from a gender-differences perspective to one that examines gender in a social context (a perspective we discuss further in the following section). Instead of asking why women do not make the same career choices as men, Eccles asked then and now (2011) why men and women make the choices they do. Her Expectancy-Value model (Eccles, et al., 1983) complicated the idea that the reasons for making achievement-related decisions reside solely within the individual: She demonstrated how the social environment affects individuals’ expectations of success, ideas about the importance of a task, and the perception of available options. Her model significantly impacted the way social psychologists think about gender differences in achievement. ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 10 The 1970s was also characterized by the struggle to better define what the feminist study of gender encompasses and how thinking about "gender" is different from amassing a list of sexrelated differences. Initially, feminists compiled and cataloged conference papers and published research as a way to make sense of the field characterized by both the conventional gender-aspersonality framework, but also a newly emerging emphasis on studying gender as function of social context (e.g., Sherman, 1971; Baer & Sherif, 1974). Another move to define the field revolved around language: how to define the boundaries of gender. By the late 1970s, it was becoming common for feminist psychologists to differentiate between sex as categorization on the basis of anatomy and physiology, and gender as a culturally-defined set of meanings attached to sex and sex difference (Unger, 1979). A parallel interest in racial ethnic psychology (Leong, 2009; Pickren, 2004) rejected the Anglo-American framing of “race psychology” (see Richards, 1997, for a history of race psychology), but concern with other social identities, such as social class (Lott & Bullock, 2007), came much later. In any event, these identity-based areas of research developed essentially independently of one another. Specifically, “gender” was primarily the study of White women, and “race” was largely the study of African Americans with no particular attention to gender. By the 1980s, there was much discussion of intersections of gender with other dimensions of social identity (e.g., Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective, 1987; Fine & Asch, 1988), but intersectionality, as a theoretical perspective reflected in research practices has only come to the forefront in psychology in recent years (e.g., Shields, 2008). Debates about gender differences research continue to the present (e.g., Kimball, 1995; 2001). At one level the debate revolves around whether difference or similarity should be emphasized. For example, comparing women and men glosses over within-group differences, ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 11 accentuates the importance of difference between groups over similarities, and reifies the categories of woman/man as having some explanatory standing on their own. Hyde (2005) has proposed an alternative approach, namely that gender similarities, not differences, are more scientifically appropriate to study. At another level, arguing difference/similarity masks what many believe, including ourselves, are the more pressing issues. In a cogent critique of differences research, Fine and Gordon (1989, p. 151) assert that “this almost exclusive construction of gender-as-difference functions inside psychology as a political and scientific diversion away from the questions of power, social context, meaning, and braided subjectivities” (also see Lott, 1997). Indeed, gender-as-difference is the principal way gender is discussed and explained in popular-culture discourse which, in turn, is absorbed into scientific discourse (Danziger, 1997; Richards, 2002; Shields & Bhatia, 2009). The end result is that gender-asdifference is transformed into an even less satisfactory difference-as-explanation. The alternative to gender-as-difference requires first the recognition that gender beliefs and behaviors are ideologies embedded in social-structural systems. It also requires acknowledging what feminist psychologists have long asserted: There is always a political dimension to the study of behavior, especially when that behavior is overtly connected to systems of power and status. From gender role to gender in context. The first generation of feminist psychologists had viewed social learning and expectations important to gender differences in behavior. It is not surprising that, with the revival of feminist psychology in the 1960s, the importance of social factors were again highlighted. As for first-generation feminists in psychology, gender learning was conceptualized as the experience of having one’s behavior, beliefs, and attitudes shaped in terms of culturally-defined, gender-specific roles − but with something of a different look. One ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 12 new development was describing gender roles as embedded in larger, interlocking socialstructural systems of power. Earlier feminist psychologists had connected women’s roles and socially-sanctioned limits on women’s behavior to a broader system of patriarchal domination, but they stopped short of seeing gender oppression as inextricably linked to other systems of oppression, such as class and race. By the mid-1980s we see the realization of the previous decade’s efforts in a phenomenally creative and influential set of publications that advanced gender theory, measurement, and the critique of gender psychology’s business as usual. The year 1987, for example, was something of a watershed in the advancement of a feminist social psychology of gender, with a number of classic books and papers published (to cite but a few: Eagly, 1987; Eccles, 1987; Deaux & Major, 1987; West & Zimmerman, 1987). The range and influence of work published during this period is even more noteworthy because the late 1980s were also period of significant backlash against feminist progress toward women’s opportunity and equality that had been made in the 1970s (Faludi, 1991). Indeed, backlash was evident as early as 1979 when the Equal Rights Amendment stalled, three states short of ratification. The construct of self-silencing is a good example of a social role approach that situates role within systems of oppression. Jack and Dill (1992) asserted the radical idea that adherence to expectations for feminine behavior is a core feature of clinical depression in women. Their approach contrasts with the diathesis-stress models of depression that focus on the individual as the problem and with the psychoanalytic view of women’s self silencing as “over dependence on oral strivings” (Jack & Dill, p.4). Instead, they situate depression in women’s response to cultural scripts of being a “good woman” and probe how adherence to those scripts negatively affects ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 13 women’s relational/self-schemas, insights that remain relevant today (Jack, 2011; Shouse & Nilsson, 2011). Alternatives to the older gender-as-trait models stressed the importance of considering gender-in-context. Gender-in-context models (e.g., Deaux & Major, 1987) emphasized that the individual’s gender repertoire was only one ingredient in any social situation. Other individuals with whom the person was interacting had their own expectations about the other person’s behavior and their own repertoire of gender-related attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. The situation, too, could be described as one that varied in how “gendered” it was and in what ways it was gendered. For example, in both a board meeting with only one token woman present and a heterosexual date, gender is salient, but observers and targets carry different gender-related expectations for each situation. Thus, whether gender-typed behavior is observed depends on the interaction among person, observer, and social context. This approach has helped researchers sort out why gender of participant seems to have a “now you see it, now you don’t” character (Deaux & Major, 1987). A relatively early example of the gender-in-context approach is Berman’s (1980) review of her own and others’ research on responsiveness to infants. Women’s and men’s responses to infants varied greatly depending on the physical and social qualities of the situation, the response required, and the research participant’s experimental or prior role relationship with the young. The move away from gender as simply a trait or a role stimulated efforts to measure the parameters of beliefs about gender, including investigation of gender stereotypes, their persistence and effects on social interaction, and the sexist beliefs that underlie and sustain reliance on stereotypes. Glick and Fiske (1997) bring us squarely to the issue at the center of the social psychology of gender: Its relation to social-structural systems of patriarchy that that ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 14 maintain and promote institutions and practices of inequity. Their paper reports the development and validation of the widely used Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI). They begin with the fact that sexism is not like other types of outgroup prejudice, yet it has similar consequences. Specifically, women and men are interdependent and cannot avoid each other, as one can do with other outgroups. This connectivity allows women to be seen in an apparently positive way (Glick & Fiske, 2011). Like Spence and Helmreich’s (1972) AWS and other specialized instruments for measuring sexism (e.g., Swim & Cohen, 1997; Tougas, Brown, Beaton, & Joly, 1995), the ASI tunes into what makes sexism “special” – that is, what makes it possible to endorse a patriarchal system that devalues women and, simultaneously, appears to be one that values women. It is the gender version of the often heard adage: “I’m not prejudiced, but…” The social constructionist approach to gender similarly presses the gender-in-context position further. The constructionist perspective conceives of gender as a process − often characterized as “doing gender” − which simultaneously creates and reinforces cultural meanings of gender and the systems of power and oppression on which it rests (Bohan, 1993; Shields, 2002; West & Zimmerman, 1987). Gender emerges through social interactions as a negotiated statement of identity; that is, gender is not something that one achieves over the course of development, but rather it is continually practiced in social interactions large and small. Viewing gender as a verb, a practice, helps us to understand why gender systems are so difficult to root out or change. As sociologist Dana Vannoy (2001, p. xx) points out: “Every moment every day individuals have the opportunity to choose to behave differently − to resist gender expectations associated with control and deference,” and yet we do not. In fact, even those of us who strive not to subscribe to gendered norms of inequality are caught up in the ordinariness of doing gender, such that “the taken-for-granted acting out of nearly invisible expectations usually re- ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 15 creates gender inequality between men and women even if gender is irrelevant to the situation” (Vannoy, p. 511). Making Feminist Research Possible: Networks and Mentors We want to note one more common theme that struck us as we each read through the commentaries and the papers on which they are based. Across all six commentaries, we noticed that the impetus for the work came from an “a-ha moment” (or "click") in the author(s)' own lived experience. From our present-day vantage, it is easy to forget that just a few years made a huge difference in how that realization could be acted on. In the early 1960s, women were underrepresented in graduate programs and were a rarity in research-oriented universities. Janet Spence was the lone female faculty member in her psychology department in the mid-1960s. Women full-professors (women of color and White women) are still noticeably underrepresented at most research universities, especially the most prestigious. But even underrepresented is an improvement over only. By the late 1960s, gender ratios were beginning to change, at least at the graduate level. This change enabled many of us to have our first foray into feminist psychology be through a collaborative venture with other feminists, as Jacqueline Eccles collaborated with four other feminist graduate students at UCLA. Eccles also she points out how her Expectancy-Value model came to an early and successful fruition because of the fortuitous combination of an NIE program officer who “got it,” involvement of engaged students, and mentoring advice from Elizabeth Douvan. (Douvan became the first president of the Society for the Psychology of Women in 1973.) Jeanne Brett Herman and Karen Kucynzki Gyllstrom undertook an innovative study in the entirely new field of work-family because of their joint interest in significant questions that other I/O psychologists had overlooked. Moving forward a few more years, Mary Kite and Dana Jack had successful ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 16 feminist faculty mentors (Kay Deaux and Carol Gilligan, respectively) to inspire them and to work collaboratively with them. To move from a marginal position to the center also requires significant professional networks (e.g., Unger, Sheese, & Main, 2010), and we see the importance of these networks, albeit gender reversed, in the most recent case of Peter Glick who writes of Susan Fiske’s openness to his sabbatical visit as the beginning of their years’ long collaboration. From Turning Points to Future Directions Having looked at where the social psychology of gender came from, we cannot resist ending this essay with some thoughts about where the psychology of gender may be headed. This charge is easier said than done. Each of us is at a quite different point in our career, but we are both motivated to be optimistic, wanting the past to make sense and the future to move us forward. With that caveat in mind, we see three important emerging themes in the social psychology of gender. (a) Reliance on a broader palette of research methods. New methods and improved methods are coming on the scene. We mention only two examples here, but our main point is that we need to think more broadly about the range of methods that lend themselves to feminist research on gender. Whether the methods are easily compatible with feminist research values or have less obvious potential, we have to remain vigilantly feminist regarding the questions that we ask, our partnership with our participants, and our interpretation of our findings. First, a wide range of qualitative methods are at last making inroads into the inner sanctum of conventional psychological research methods. Qualitative work is often lauded as an ideal feminist approach to research because it gives voice to research participants and has the potential to level the power relationship between researcher and participant. For qualitative ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 17 studies and mixed qualitative/quantitative methods to fulfill this promise, however, students need to be exposed to the wide range of qualitative techniques available and receive adequate training in their use. Importantly, too, exploration of qualitative and mixed methods helps feminist researchers maintain a healthy skepticism regarding “value-neutral” research and foster awareness of the politics of the research process (e.g., Cosgrove & McHugh, 2010; Gergen, 2001) Second, neuroscience techniques are here to stay. A feminist research presence is important in neuroscience because, if no one is there to point out boundary conditions or faulty applications of the techniques, we risk witnessing a revival of the 19th century psychology of gender that defined women’s social-structural dilemmas as no more than an expression of women’s (neuro)biology (Fine, 2008). But beyond monitoring misapplication, brain imaging and other behavioral biomarkers such as salivary cortisol, should be explored for what they might add to feminist research. For example, these they may contribute to building long-needed testable theories that address the complex interrelation of biological, social, emotional, and cognitive events in constructing and maintaining gendered behavior. (b) Intersectionality of social identities. For years, feminist psychologists have asserted that our research must take into account the fact that social identities do not function independently of one another. Recently we see the beginnings of a move to take seriously the need to modify old research practices or create new ones that enable the study of intersectionality with some sophistication (e.g., Bowleg, 2008; Warner, 2008). Besides being a more accurate representation of lived experience, an intersectionality perspective troubles the biological essentialism that occurs in flows from unidimensional group comparisons. We noted earlier in our paper some limitations associated with the gender differences approach to research. It has ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 18 also long been understood that when two groups are compared, one inevitably serves as the standard against which the other is measured. Comparing women and men, for example, glosses over within-group differences, accentuates the importance of difference between groups, and reifies the categories of woman/man as having some explanatory standing on their own (HareMustin & Marecek, 1988). When the groups are construed as “natural” groups (women/men; Black/White; even rich/poor), the explanatory path of least resistance is an attribution to nature/biology/ancestral conditions. (c) Gender as systems of status and power relations. There is still a long way to go in sorting out how gender, status, and power operate within specific social contexts. In social psychological research, power is often conceptualized as an attribute of individuals whose status grants them position and resources to influence others. Most social psychological research concerned with power tends to focus on the effects of power on the less powerful and the powerholders, so the contexts studied are those in which status and power go together. When we apply questions of power to gender, however, it can be important to disaggregate the two constructs, particularly if we do so keeping intersectionality in mind. Intersections create both oppression and opportunity (Baca Zinn & Thornton Dill, 1996), so both status and whatever power is attached to a given intersectional position are relative to who else is in the situation and to the nature of the situation. Deaux (2000) points out that if status and power are conflated, we risk essentializing the link between gender and power. To take an example from our own collaborative research in progress, it appears that participants rate angry targets differently by gender/racial ethnicity, but also by context. Anger is an emotion which expresses of a sense of violated entitlement, and its aim is to restore order (not necessarily achieved). It may be that higher status individuals are ANNIVERSARY SECTION – 1 19 believed to have a greater sense of entitlement about more things, meaning their angry responses are more likely to be expected or tolerated. On the other hand, it may be that perceived power to effect change is only loosely related to perceived status, and anger takes a different meaning if expressed under conditions in which there is little power to change the situation compared to others in which there is more power. So we need to understand whether perceived anger for different groups is due to status implied by intersectional position, beliefs about the group’s capacity to experience violated entitlement in the situation, differences in willingness to assert their entitlement, or beliefs about the efficacy of asserting it. A Concluding Thought Our collaboration on this introduction to the special section reminded both of us about why we are passionate about our research and committed to studying the psychology of gender. We came to this collaboration from two very different points in our career. For Stephanie, reviewing this history was a reminder of how far the field has moved forward from its complicated mid-20th century beginnings as a female-pathologizing, heterosexist province of psychodynamic personality theory. For Elaine, it was a reminder of how much she has benefitted from the feminist movement generally and within psychology. 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Given space limitations, we are able to cite only a fraction of the many influential and representative publications pertinent to our account. We also include reference to some sociological work that has had a marked effect on the development of feminist psychology.