Gender Similarities

Gender Similarities

  • Submitted By: bueno95
  • Date Submitted: 10/01/2013 1:16 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 434
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 62

Gender Similarities
In Janet Hyde’s, Gender Similarities Hypothesis on Sexual Behavior, her hypothesis was, “The gender similarities hypothesis holds that males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables. That is, men and women, as well as boys and girls, are more alike than they are different.” She strongly believes that women and men are very much alike and provides studies, tables, and experiments in her article.
In the article is talked about many popular beliefs in psychological gender differences. In the article is stated, “beliefs that girls are more “social” than boys; that girls are more suggestible; that girls have lower self-esteem; that girls are better at rote learning and simple tasks, whereas boys are better at higher level cognitive processing; and that girls lack achievement motivation.” Hyde’s concluded that gender differences were well established in only four areas: verbal ability, visual-spatial ability, mathematical ability, and aggression.
The four steps for the studies:
(a) The researcher locates all studies on the topic being reviewed, typically using databases such as PsycINFO and carefully chosen search terms.
(b) Statistics are extracted from each report, and an effect size is computed for each study.
(c) A weighted average of the effect sizes is computed (weighting by sample size) to obtain an overall assessment of the direction and magnitude of the gender difference when all studies are combined.
(d) Homogeneity analyses are conducted to determine whether the group of effect sizes is relatively homogeneous.
Overall the result is that, “30% of the effect sizes are in the close-to-zero range, and an additional 48% are in the small range. That is, 78% of gender differences are small or close to zero.” The studies concluded that men and women are overall similar. One of the largest gender differences was throwing velocity and throwing distance, generally after puberty. Also, there was a large...

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