Psychology of Women Quarterly

A 38-item questionnaire was sent to 440 instructors of psychology of women courses; 230 surveys were returned. This article examines characteristics of people who teach courses in psychology of women, characteristics of their institutions, characteristics of the course itself, and the instructors' reactions to the course. Among the findings are: (a) instructors in this course vary greatly in the number of years they have taught the course and in their area of graduate training; (b) few instructors had taken a formal course in psychology of women; (c) the course is usually a highly emotional one; and (d) almost all instructors enjoyed teaching the psychology of women course more than their other courses.

A set of three studies replicated and extended Abbey's (1982) research, indicating that men perceive less friendliness, but more sexuality than women when observing women's social interactions. Study 1 was based on 49 previously unacquainted male-female pairs who engaged in brief face-to-face discussions, and 48 males and 61 females who observed one of those discussions. Study 2 was based on videotaped exchanges between a male store manager and a female cashier, and Study 3 between a male professor and a female student; 75 males and 88 females participated in Study 2, while 98 males and 102 females participated in Study 3. In all three studies, the men saw less friendliness, but more “sexiness” in the woman's behavior than the women. These results support the idea that some of the less severe forms of sexual harassment in business and academic settings may be better understood eventually through research and theory development that considers these sex differences in social perceptions.

In order to explore factors that influence gender differences in same-sex friendship behaviors, the present study examined how affiliation motive, as measured by thematic apperception to same-sex cues, and affiliation value, obtained from a modified Edwards (1957) Personal Preference Scale, determined type of friendship situation (unstructured, structured, or group) and its particular qualities for 37 female and 31 male undergraduates. Men consistently had lower affiliation motivation and affiliation values than women. Subjects' reports of actual friendship episodes showed gender differences in type of friendship episode, self-disclosure, and involvement. However, there were no gender differences in mood and levels of meaningfulness, pleasantness, and satisfaction with the episodes, suggesting that the sexes differed in their manner of engaging in friendship, but not in subjective outcomes. Regression analyses indicated that some of these differences were partially a function of gender differences in personality determinants of friendship behavior.

In this study, 22 female and 20 male 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with six story starts and were asked to finish the stories. In their stories, girls introduced significantly more friendly figures who offered assistance; boys introduced significantly more aggressive behavior and attempts to master situations through the use of aggressive activity. Girls told significantly more stories about girls; boys tended to tell more stories about boys. A factor analysis of the coding categories is discussed. The analysis of the fantasy narratives showed boys to be more concerned with coping with aggressive drives and channeling them into attempts at mastery, and girls with caretaking and responding to the needs of others.

Examined women's sex-role orientation, coping strategies, self-efficacy, and stress in male- and female-dominated occupations. Results (n = 281) revealed that high-masculine women (measured by the Bem Sex Role Inventory), compared with low-masculine women, reported significantly lower scores on measures of anxiety and strain, with the exception of interpersonal strain. High-masculine women, compared with low-masculine women, reported greater problem- relative to emotion-focused coping and higher self-efficacy. Low-feminine women in nontraditional occupations reported higher self-efficacy and greater problem-focused coping compared with low-feminine women in traditional occupations. The relation between masculinity and strain was nonsignificant when the variance due to self-efficacy was partialed out, suggesting that the relationship between sex role and strain may be mediated by personal efficacy.

This research tested the hypothesis that the gender distribution of personality disorders stems from the resemblance between each personality disorder and the role/role-stereotype of the status group for whom the disorder is prevalent. The first study found that undergraduates attributed descriptions of each personality disorder to the gender, social class, and marital status of the group that tends to receive that label; the second study found that the Sadistic and the Self-Defeating Personality Disorders of the DSM-IIIR were attributed to white males and middle-class females, respectively. It is suggested that personality disorders represent the roles/role-stereotypes of both genders.

This study, the second in a series of investigations of sexist discrimination in face-to-face situations, involved the observations of women and men characters on 10 primetime TV shows found to be most popular with a sample of eighth graders. Distancing behavior—the operational measure of face-to-face discrimination—was found, as predicted, to be manifested more frequently by men TV characters toward women than toward men. Distancing behavior by women TV characters, on the other hand, was not related to the gender of the person with whom they were interacting. Observations were made independently by 53 trained college students, most of whom watched four preassigned TV programs, focusing on either a woman or a man character during a 10–12 minute segment. It was also found that women TV characters appeared less often in the programs than men and that, when they did appear, they were more likely to be shown interacting with men than with other women. Implications for behavioral modeling are discussed.