Gender bias refers to the situation whereby people of one gender are indiscriminately treated differently from the other gender. In the traditional ways of doing research, male respondents were being given more attention compared to their female counterparts.
Feminist research methodologies were however, developed over the years to ensure that even women get the chance to participate in the research activities. One of the factors that promote gender biases in research includes lack of sufficient research on the positions held by men and women in society.
The other factor is the kind of the research whereby the most of these psychological researches are based on stereotypes rather than the real differences between man and women. Finally, is the differences in behaviors between men and women in that women have a lot of strange behaviors brought about by changes in their hormonal balance such as during the PMS and PMT stages.
Gender bias has been a factor in research for many years. The most affected research area by this factor is medicine owing to the stereotype that most of the health disorders affect either males or females and rarely can you find ailments that affect both genders with equal magnitude.
A good example of this is when research is being conducted on cardiac disorders. These are largely believed to be common in men; hence such researches are done on male samples. The assumption made in such cases is that the female population affected by these disorders is trivial hence insignificant in the research (Brannon 231).
The result of this is that cures and control mechanisms are developed for men, and it is assumed that this will work for women too. This however could not be the case because it has been discovered that women react differently to medications compared to men.
In some cases however, gender bias in research is valid, a good example being the case of research on the condition of women during pregnancy. This will never affect men and hence using female samples to collect the data is warranted.
According to Brannon, “women had always been excluded from research activities that led to the validation of most clinical drugs owing to what was referred to as safety reasons.
However, this prohibition did not have clear information on the effects of clinical drugs drugs on women” (234). This finding sent most of the drugs to the laboratory also owing to the fact that women were being affected adversely by these.
Psychological research was also generally conducted on men as the original respondents then women came in second as secondary respondents. This changed after it was discovered that most people with psychological problems can be traced with a problem that affected the mothers either during pregnancy or when bringing up the child.
This perspective changed, and a conclusion was made that “men may be the prototype of modern psychology’s picture of the typical person, but mothers remain the typical kind of parent” (Brannon 233).
From these illustrations, it is clear that gender bias is a major factor in research especially of a psychological nature. The researchers should be very sensitive to the needs of both groups before coming up with any conclusions.
They also need to come up with ways of determining with accuracy the gender that is affected by that research mostly before coming up with conclusions of the research. This will ensure that the findings are more accurate and avoid the cases where over time most psychological research findings are being considered void.
An example of this is like the one stated above which involves medication. Most of the drugs that had been produced were banned from the market when it was realized that they had adverse effects on the health of women. This could have been avoided initially by equally selecting population samples containing a mixture of men and women.
Works Cited
Brannon, Linda. Psychological Perspective 5th ed. Louisiana: McNeese State University, 1996.