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In psychology, there seems to be a bias towards females, leading to
the misinterpretation of women. For example in experimental studies, the performance of the participants tends to be influenced by the expectations of the investigator. People have lower expectations for women; therefore we collect data showing lower task performance for
them.

Two people who have investigated gender bias in psychological research are Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1988). They give two forms of gender bias; firstly Alpha Bias which is the tendency to exaggerate
differences between the sexes and Beta Bias, this is the tendency to minimise or ignore differences between the sexes.

It has appeared to be that alpha bias is more popular in western cultures. For example Freud said that a child’s superego develops when they identify with their parent of the same sex. Boys identify with
their father more than daughters identify with their mother resulting in boys developing the stronger superego. Hoffman disagreed with this theory saying that there was no significant difference in the
behaviours of boy and girls and also found that girls in fact are much better at resisting temptation. Also Freud only studied middle-class Viennese women which suggest cultural bias.

Beta bias produces sex differences in research. Male and female participants are used in most studies but there is no attempt to analyse the data to see whether there are significant sex differences.
These sex differences found maybe due to differential treatment of the participants. Rosenthal found that experimenters were more pleasant and friendly towards the female participants. Rosenthal concluded that male and female participants may psychologically simply not be in the
same experiment.

Stage theories in psychology tend to have been founded on research done with men and then have their results generalised to...