The Social Psychology of Sex and Gender

Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, gender became an important topic in U.S. social psychology, raising questions about the conceptual relationship between “sex” and “gender.” A second-wave feminist project to describe differences between women and men as previously exaggerated and currently changeable was aligned with social psychology’s emphasis on the distorting power of stereotypes and the strong influence of immediate situations on human behavior. Feminism and social psychology both suggested psychology could foment social transformation, and the authors and participants of psychological research have undoubtedly become far less “womanless” in the past half-century. By the late 1980s several incommensurate social psychologies of gender existed, creating debates about the meaning of emphasizing gender differences and similarities and the gendered social psychology of psychological science itself. However, psychology remained largely a “white space” in the 1970s and 1980s, which were also “difficult decades” in transgender history. The increasing recognition of intersectional feminism and trans-affirmative perspectives in the 2010s set the context for regarding this history from different contemporary standpoints.