The Psychology of Women - An Inclusive Approach · LibreTexts
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12.7: Conclusion
Opening the book…
Deciding who is disordered is a human judgment, made by people carrying the assumptions of their time, and those judgments have gone harder on women who would not behave. Blanche Wittmann's episodes were staged for a hall of male physicians. Homosexuality sat in the DSM until 1973. Girls whose ADHD shows up as a racing mind rather than a disruptive one go uncounted. Students of color report more eating-disorder symptoms than White students and are diagnosed less often. The judgment continues into treatment, where American women are more than twice as likely as men to be taking an antidepressant, and where women veterans with PTSD are more likely than men to be prescribed the medications that the guidelines advise against.
Women's higher rates of depression, anxiety, and eating disorders are extensions of communal expectations, and men's higher rates of substance use and conduct problems are extensions of agentic ones. The trait research in Section 12.6 makes a similar point since unmitigated communion and unmitigated agency are the feminine and masculine roles carried to a harmful extreme.
Almost none of these differences is large. About ninety percent of the disorder-level effects in a review of 257 meta-analyses were small. Gender explained under one percent of the variance in later-life well-being. The single best estimate of the gender difference in life satisfaction is not distinguishable from zero. What the differences do have is structure, and the structure is where the explanation lives.
Think back to the two students at the start of the chapter, the one who stopped sleeping and said nothing, and the one who started drinking and insisted everything was fine. Neither of them invented their response to a hard semester. They did what they had been taught to do with distress, and both are likely to meet a clinic that has learned to expect that. You are now in a position to ask a better question about each of them. Rather than what is wrong with this person, ask what they were taught to do with pain, and who taught them.