About This Book

Approach and Overview

This is an introduction to the psychology of women, written with community college students in mind, whose varied lives and experiences are part of what makes this subject come alive.

You might wonder why chapters have titles like "Gender in the Workplace" rather than "Women in the Workplace." This was a deliberate choice. Women's challenges grow out of how gender as a whole is constructed, and studying women alone can obscure that. Throughout this book, you'll see women penalized for stepping outside what they are "supposed" to be, and you'll see how the experiences of people who are not women make that pattern clearer. For example, trans men interviewed by Schilt (2006) described being taken more seriously at work after transitioning, even in the same jobs. Across topics, you'll see that there is a double bind. Women are judged for not being feminine enough, yet femininity itself is treated as a liability, no matter who expresses it. Fully understanding women's experiences, therefore, means looking at the whole gender system, especially the devaluation of femininity, and how it shapes women's lives whether or not they are feminine themselves.

The twelve chapters move from the categories of sex and gender themselves outward to the institutions that benefit from them, and to the consequences of a binary sex and gender system. Chapters 1 through 4 lay the foundation: how cultures sort people by sex and gender, how feminist and LGBTIQA+ movements have contested that sorting, how psychological research on gender has been done well and badly, what biology does and does not determine, and which developmental theories allow for gender diversity. Chapter 5 analyzes gender as a social construct that works to maintain existing power hierarchies. Chapters 6 through 10 examine the impact of those constructs on research and on human psychology across several domains, including cognition, communication and emotion, the workplace, sexuality and relationships, and masculinity, aggression, and violence. Chapters 11 and 12 turn to physical and mental health, where those consequences are explored.

Two priorities shape the content throughout. Trans and nonbinary experience is analyzed inside every chapter. And race, class, and sexuality are pulled through each topic as part of the analysis to highlight intersectionality, and to identify the limits of generalizability when research is conducted on limited samples.

A note on AI tools

The author acknowledges the use of AI tools, Claude (Anthropic) and NotebookLM (Google), during the development of this book, from 2025 to 2026. These tools were used for outlining, structural organization, editing, and reference formatting. All AI-assisted content was critically reviewed and substantially revised by the author, and all citations were verified against original sources. Final responsibility for all content, including accuracy, tone, and pedagogical framing, rests with the author.