had her first baby and I remember really
really clearly when she was pregnant
mostly I remember because she had to
give up drinking and this was really
unfortunate this was our favorite thing
to do we used to go to the pub every
week and set the world’s to write and
now we couldn’t do this anymore which
was really unfortunate we had to come up
with new activities which was hard but
the other thing that I remember about
her being pregnant was that everybody
would always ask her the same question
when they found out she was having a
baby and I’m sure all of you can guess
what that question is right so the first
question when you find out someone is
pregnant is you want to know are you
having a girl or a boy and Emily she’s
English like me so she’s very polite and
she actually answered people properly
and she said that she was having a girl
and Scarlett was born last January I
like to think that if I was pregnant and
somebody asked me if I was having a girl
or a boy that I would respond probably
or that maybe if I was feeling extra
cheeky I might say well I don’t know I’m
sure they’ll let me know when they’re
old enough to figure it out for
themselves so even though I always have
this reaction and get kind of annoyed by
this question I really understand where
it comes from
the reason why people care about this
question so much is that gender whether
we want it to be or not is the backdrop
against which we live our entire lives
so gender impacts what we wear it
impacts how we interact with people it
impacts the toys that we buy it impacts
who we sit with in the school lunch room
and it even impacts where we can and
can’t go to the toilet right so it’s
really really pervasive so when I think
about gender and how I became interested
in it sometimes I wonder if it’s because
when I was a little girl I was a little
gender ambiguous my mum didn’t know how
to style hair so she just cut it short
this is me with a mullet at age seven
it’s slightly embarrassing I can’t be
from showing this to the world but this
is what I used to look like and one of
my earliest memories is
going to the post office with my mum and
with my brother and this woman coming
over and saying to my mum Oh what
beautiful twin boys you have and I’m
sure my brother doesn’t remember this at
all but for me it was somewhat of a
traumatic experience this is actually
why I always have long hair because it
like really impacted me that much and so
I think sometimes maybe this is where my
interest came from I’ve always been
interested in what it means to be a girl
what it means to be a boy what gender is
what that means what gender identity
means and so I spent the last fifteen
years of my life and it’s crazy to think
I’ve been doing this for that long
studying gender so today what I’m gonna
tell you about is how psychology has
been approaching gender historically and
how I think we need to be approaching it
not just in psychology but as a society
as we move forward so I’m gonna start
off by telling you a little bit of some
of the history of how psychologists have
conceptualized gender so one of the
first gender models was terminal miles
and they came up with this bipolar model
with masculinity on one end and
femininity on the other and so you could
fall anywhere on the scale regardless of
your biological sex and this was
actually pretty revolutionary for its
time this came out in the 30s 1936 they
published a book on this and I still
here to this day students and sometimes
colleagues and friends referring to
gender as something that happens along a
continuum so as I said this was
progressive but there are some problems
with this type of model so with this
model you can be a little bit feminine
you could be a lot feminine you could be
a little bit masculine you can be a lot
masculine but you can’t be very feminine
and very masculine at the same time so
in the 1970s there were two feminist
psychologists who were working
independently so an constantinople was
one of them and Sandra BEM some of you
may have heard of her was another one
and they both wrote separate papers
talking about the idea that people could
be feminine they could be masculine or
they could be both feminine and
masculine and so Sandra BEM actually
coined a term for this you may have
heard of it before
psychological androgyny so I’m gonna
tell you a little bit now about my
history with studying gender
so I did my PhD at West Virginia
University and when I got there I knew
that I wanted to study gender that’s
actually why I picked WVU there’s a
bunch of great gender researchers there
and so when you’re a first-year graduate
student you spend a lot of time just
wallowing in the literature and so I was
reading all of these things about gender
and gender identity and I found myself
getting really confused and overwhelmed
I felt sorry just couldn’t understand
any of it people were approaching it in
so many different ways that I actually
kind of gave up on studying gender
identity and I decided I was gonna study
gender and friendships which I’ve really
enjoyed and they really like but
recently two years ago I sat down to
actually write a paper on gender
identity and so again I went back to the
literature and I typed gender identity
into EBSCOhost which is an academic
database that indexes hundreds and
thousands of academic articles and I got
back over 11,000 articles all with this
keyword gender identity and so I thought
oh let me just take a little sampling of
these I’ll have a look and see how
people are defining gender identity and
what I found was pretty crazy there are
lots of different definitions so one of
them was how you feel about your gender
femininity and masculinity gendered
behavior gender contentment bias toward
gender groups body gender identity
pressure to form to conform to gender
roles whether someone’s butch or femme
and then even erotic roles so all of
these things came up as gender identity
so when I saw these I actually felt
comforted for a few minutes because it’s
like oh it’s not just me who finds this
confusing everyone’s confused we’ve all
got different definitions and then the
more I looked at these the more I
realized well maybe this is what gender
is we’re trying to narrow it down so
much into one thing and maybe it isn’t
really one thing and so fortunately for
me I’m not the only person in psychology
thinking this way so a good friend of
mine and colleague Charlotte Tate has
written this wonderful paper where she
describes the gender bundle so I’m gonna
present that to you today so you can
imagine coming downstairs the door bells
rung you open it up oh there’s a big box
of gender isn’t this exciting so we’ll
open it up out comes a whole bunch of
gender for us to look
and so now I’m gonna go through each of
these things and explain them to you a
little bit so the first one we’ve got
here is your birth assigned gender
category so this is the gender that is
assigned to you at Birth by some kind of
cultural Authority so essentially
someone looks at your genitals and says
you’re a boy you’re a girl or you’re
something else maybe you’re intersex
so the second one is your current gender
identity and this is your self
categorization so how do you feel what
gender do you know yourself to be
and our gender identity profiles are
calculated between both of these so if
your birth assigned gender category
matches with your current gender
identity we say that you’re cisgender
and if it’s different we say that you’re
transgender so now back to the rest of
the gender bundle so we’ve got gender
roles so this is how well you are dear
to society’s expectations for your
gender
we’ve got gender social presentation so
this is how you look do you present as
feminine do you present as masculine or
do you play around with gender and the
way that you dress and the way that you
appear and then the last one is gender
evaluations so how do you feel about
your own gender group and how do you
feel about the other gender group so
looking at this bundle I thought that it
was great I really liked it but I felt
that I wanted to add some more things to
it so in my own work I’ve added gender
salience so this refers to how aware you
are of your gender in any given moment
I’ve also added gender type personality
traits so this refers to how feminine or
masculine you are in terms of your
stereotypical traits so are you
assertive are you nurturing and then the
last one that I added was gender
reference group identity so this is how
similar and how psychologically
connected you feel to your own gender so
hopefully you’re looking at this bundle
and this is kind of making sense to you
and you’re thinking yes yes this is
gender it’s all of these different
things and maybe you’re even adding some
of your own little boxes as you look at
this which I hope you are but I’m going
to complicate this just a little bit
more so I talked about Sandra BEM
earlier
Sandra BEM came up with a measure so in
psychology when we give people
questioned Hasmik all the measures so
she came up with a measure to assess
people’s femininity and masculinity so
their gender type personality traits
and this is kind of what it looks like
these are some sample items from this
measure so this would be given to people
and they would look at it and they would
go through and they would indicate on a
scale of zero to seven how true these
statements are for them and so when
they’re doing this they’re doing this
just at one point in time so your
femininity ‘m masculinity is being
measured at one point in time and you’re
answering this in terms of how typical
this trait is for you in general so this
assumes that these traits are stable and
that they’re consistent over time and
over context and i don’t know about you
but when i think about my own life this
is definitely not true so sometimes I’m
really not sure and loving and kind and
that’s usually when I see a big fluffy
dog because like everyone else I see a
big fluffy dog they just get down on the
ground and start snuggling it and say
this is what they do when they see a dog
so this is me being nurturing but
sometimes I can be assertive so in my
classes I have a rule they teach college
I have a rule that I do not accept late
papers and I actually every time I talk
about this I get one wound up about it
because I get really annoyed I do not
take late papers I think it’s a good
lesson for students to learn that you
have to turn things and on time and so
if a student asks me which inevitably
every semester someone will come up to
me and say can I turn this in it’s late
and I say no I told you at the beginning
of the semester I don’t take late papers
and so I’m always proud of myself for
being really assertive about this and
then sometimes you get these students
who just will not stop asking and in
these cases I can even get aggressive so
these are examples of masculine traits
right but depending on the context and
who I’m interacting with I’m going to be
either more feminine so typically
feminine or stereotypically masculine
and you don’t have to just take my
example so President Obama we can look
at him I know a lot of people are
missing him right now he’s a good
example to use so we’ve seen him exhibit
good leadership skills that’s
stereotypically masculine people always
talked about him playing basketball so
that’s competitive again a masculine
trait and we’ve seen him be really
assertive as well but we also see him
act
find a nurturing with his family he was
yielding when he let the kids get a dog
remember that everyone was talking about
them getting a dog at the White House
and we’ve even seen him be emotional
after the Sandy Hook shooting so again
you can see it’s not just me
probably for all of us it depends on the
context who were interacting with and
what we’re doing as to how feminine or
how masculine we are so back to the
gender bundle so I’ve just focused just
now on one of these components so I
focus on gender type personality traits
but when you look at this bundle you can
see that there are many components here
that might vary across context there are
some that are going to stay the same so
our birth assigned gender category it
doesn’t really matter who we’re
interacting with or what we’re doing
that’s probably going to stay the same
but something like our gender
evaluations is probably going to vary so
I might feel differently about my gender
if I’ve just watched Hillary Clinton on
TV versus watching Keeping Up with the
Kardashians which I will say is one of
my dirty little secrets I really like
the show and likewise my evaluation of
the other sexes will probably vary
depending on whether or not the guy I’m
dating has recently made me some soup so
what I want you to take away from this
is first of all that gender is
multi-dimensional we shouldn’t be
thinking about it as just being one
thing anymore and I also want us to be
thinking about gender as being variable
and context dependent so in the
beginning I was talking about scarlet
and what does this mean for the world
that Scarlett who just turned a year old
a couple of weeks ago what does this
mean for the world she’s growing up in
well it’s gonna be a little while until
she’s filling out her passport
application and deciding what gender
she’s gonna pick but for now I know that
I’ve definitely seen her behaving
feminine ways she can be very emotional
and very loving and I’ve also seen her
behave in masculine ways she can be very
assertive she’s won now but I know that
when I think about how she’s gonna cope
in the future and how she’s gonna do one
thing that I do know is that she’s
pretty much prepared for anything that
the context throws at her thank you you