Psychology of Gender

To date, most of my posts have been the factual relaying of information. However, I would like to mention that I am enrolled in a summer course entitled The Psychology of Gender. This course, taught by Jaime Mullet at FDU, will examine research materials regarding the psychological experiences of humans as gendered beings. We will be discussing the following questions:

• In what ways are women and men similar and different?
• What contributes to these differences?
• When are these differences significant?

We started off our first class by making sure that we were all clear on the differences between the terms sex and gender. Of course, being a biologist I defined sex as the genotype and gender as the phenotype. Phenotype is the result of genetic makeup, environment and an interaction between one's genetic makeup and environment. And as we learned on the first evening, there are a lot of cultural and social influences that determine gender. We read a fascinating article The Islands where Boys grow up to be Girls which describes the fa'afafine of Samoa.