Outline and evaluate the Biological approach to gender development The biological approach to gender development tells us that sex determines if an individual is genetically a male or female but that gender determines your own feelings about who you are as a person, either masculine or feminine, and this is due to the differences in their brains. This usually is due to the chromosomes a person has or hormonal differences. Every individual has 23 pairs of chromosomes. Women have 2 X chromosomes while men have an X and a Y chromosome. As an embryo, a male’s Y chromosome starts to produce testosterone and other male sex hormones.
In the majority of cases, the child’s biological sex matches their gender and there are no problems. However, some children are born “inter-sex”; they have ambiguous genitals and are not obviously one sex or the other. Money believed that, providing that a a child’s sex is decided before their 3rd birthday, social factors are so influential that children will accept their assigned gender identity. The third year is another critical period, and because a child’s gender identity is established by then, it cannot thereafter be changed without causing the child significant psychological problems. Early research did support this hypothesis.
The presence of the Y chromosome induces the developing gonads to produce hormones, including testosterone , which stimulate the development of the male internal reproductive system. If these hormones are not present, the embryo continues to develop as a female. Male hormones are essential to the development of a male whereas female hormones do not appear necessary for the development of female structures-these are capable of developing autonomously. Indeed, if a male animal embryo is castrated early enough, the animal will develop as a full biological female. At 4 months of gestation, the testosterone leads to the development of the external male sex organs.
Biological explanations of gender development by Andy Watson The biological approach takes an extreme nature view of gender development as it believes that an individual’s gender is decided at conception. However this is a reductionist view as both social learning theory and psychodynamic theory have shown that our environment plays an important role in shaping our gender identity. Gender is a psychological term, which may reflect a person’s biological sex but is more to do with how they behave or think. This contrasts with the term sex which refers to biological status as male or female. When a foetus is formed, it has 2 sex chromosomes which decide if the foetus will be male or female.
COMPARE AND CONTRAST GENDER CONSISTENCY THEORY AND GENDER SCHEMA THEORY Any cognitive developmental theory is based on the idea that children have to have reached a certain level of cognitive development before they can appreciate certain concepts, such as what it means to be a boy or girl, and the full implications of this. The gender consistency theory proposed by Kohlberg in 1966 and the gender schema theory proposed by Martin and Halverson in 1983 are the two major gender development theories considered by psychologists. Kohlberg’s theory was considered the dominant theory up until the 1970s and it was believed that biology heavily affected gender development. However there were many disputes over some elements of the theory, which lead to further theories such as the gender schema theory being developed. The major difference between the two is that the gender consistency theory proposes that children’s understanding of gender develops with age, whilst the gender schema theory suggests that early childhood gender development is influenced heavily by the ideas and concepts about what ‘maleness’ or ‘femaleness’ means in a particular society.
Whereas grand fathers are far less likely to invest because not only might they not be the father of their son but their son might not be the father of the new offspring. Child rearing for women comes at a high expense. They have to care for the child for a minimum of nine months and then they are relied up on by the child after the birth for demands such as breast feeding. Therefore females not only make the greater parental contribution but also the largest postnatal contribution. Random mating is therefore so much more costly for women compared to men.
There is a link between an individual’s chromosome sex (XX and XY) and their external genitalia (vagina or penis) and internal genitalia (ovaries or testes). Over time, a gene on the Y chromosome, the SRY gene, causes the gonads of the embryo to develop as testes. If the embryo has no Y chromosome, it will not have the SRY gene, without this SRY gene the gonads will develop as ovaries. The testes and ovaries begin to produce different levels of sex hormones which affect gender development. Some babies can be born with atypical sex chromosomes.
Bussey came to this conclusion when he found that children imitate same sex models but do not imitate same sex models that are gender inappropriate. Gender roles are also affected by social influences like parents. Parents sometimes have strong opinions on the divides between genders which results in different reinforcements for different behaviours. For example, a mother may react negatively to their daughter playing with masculine toys but positively to their son playing with the same toys. Parental influence has strengths, for example there is a wealth of scientific evidence supporting it.
Increasingly, we are told that the source of these robust preferences must lie outside society—in prenatal hormonal influences, brain chemistry, genes—and that feminism has reached its natural limits. What else could possibly explain the love of preschool girls for party dresses or the desire of toddler boys own more guns than Mark from Michigan? True, recent studies claim to show small cognitive differences between the sexes: He gets around by orienting himself in space; she does it by remembering landmarks. Time will tell if any deserve the hoopla with which each is invariably greeted, over the protests of the researchers themselves. But even if the results hold up (and the history of such research is not encouraging), we don’t need studies of sex differentiated brain activity in reading, say, to understand why boys and girls still seem so unalike.
It is said that individuals who have these traits may have parents with the same traits. But not all individuals who turn to crime are from broken home homes, some are from homes with supportive parents. Parenting affects a child’s temperament and is inter-related in important ways to include harsh physical discipline, parental supervision, and antisocial attitudes. Parenting plays an important role in the development of antisocial behavior. At an early age boys tend to be more aggressive than girls, due to the ability to socialize being easier for girls than for boys thereby, creating gender difference in antisocial behavior.