Mary Crawford

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Connecticut

A review of 30 studies published since 1980 found evidence for the continued existence of sexual double standards: different standards of sexual permissiveness for women and men. Experimental studies have included predominantly White North American college students; ethnographies, focus group and interview studies, and linguistic analyses have incl...

This study investigates how women and men in the Western Cape, South Africa, construct their gender identities and roles. As part of the development of an HIV prevention intervention for men, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were conducted. Several themes regarding the construction of gender were identified. First, participants...

Sex trafficking is a type of human trafficking that disproportionately affects girls and women. This article describes the scope of international sex trafficking, relying on global comparisons such as the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report and empirical research with survivors in various regions. Although international sex tra...

Sex trafficking ? buying and selling human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation ? is an egregious violation of human rights and a form of gender-linked violence that has affected millions of people, primarily girls and women. Survivors experience severe physical and mental health consequences, sometimes exacerbated by stigmatization and cr...

Menstrual stigma has been demonstrated in many societies. However, there is little research on menstrual attitudes in South Asia, despite religiously-based menstrual restrictions imposed on women. To understand menstrual stigma in this context, we conducted qualitative research with women in Nepal. Nepali Hinduism forbids menstruating women to ente...

Previous research has documented that gender and racial stereotypes affect beliefs about communication style. This study sought to investigate whether these stereotypes would be replicated in a sample of White working adults and whether participants thought that a social skills training program that is usually targeted at women would have an impact...

Lesbians have been consistently ignored in empirical psychological research. The current research extends Lee and Crawford's (200711. Lee , I.-C. and Crawford , M. 2007. Lesbians and bisexual women in the eyes of scientific psychology. Feminism & Psychology, 17: 109–127. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) comprehensive review, whi...

This chapter describes the consequences of a sex-difference approach, then focuses to a new perspective that conceives of gender as a social system that organizes relations of status and power. The gender system works to produce and maintain itself at three levels: sociocultural, interactional, and individual. The sex-difference approach exclusivel...

We examined the intersection of gender and work through an investigation of relationally motivated behaviour in the workplace. Using Fletcher's ethnography of women's relational practices in a masculine work environment as a springboard, we examined Fletcher's typology of relational practice, participants' perceptions of employees who perform these...

Trafficking of girls and women for the purpose of sexual exploitation is a problem worldwide, particularly in South Asia. This review focuses on Nepal-to-India sex trafficking with an examination of current anti-trafficking intervention and prevention programs. The activities of both governmental agencies and nongovernment organizations are describ...

South Africa is in the midst of one of the world's most devastating HIV/AIDS epidemics and there is a well-documented association between violence against women and HIV transmission. Interventions that target men and integrate HIV prevention with gender-based violence prevention may demonstrate synergistic effects. A quasi-experimental field interv...

Self-objectification (Fredrickson and Roberts 1997) has been related to negative psychological consequences in U.S. women. However, little cross-cultural research has been done. We compared convenience samples of American and Nepali women on two measures of self-objectification. Pairs of Nepali mothers and daughters (N = 23) and pairs of U.S. mothe...

Performance cues (PCs) are the mental landmarks that a musician monitors to track the progress of a piece as it unfolds during perform- ance. We describe a survey to determine how PC use is affected by ex- perience, instrument, musical style, and by the goals of the performance. We summarize results from longitudinal case studies in which PCs were...

Performance cues (PCs) are the mental landmarks that a musician monitors to track the progress of a piece during performance. We compared PC reports from nine case studies in which musicians recorded their practice as they learned a new piece for performance and then reported their PCs. Our results indicate that the number and type of PCs differ wi...

Instant messaging (IM) has become one of the most popular forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and is especially prevalent on college campuses. Previous research suggests that IM users often multitask while conversing online. To date, no one has yet examined the cognitive effect of concurrent IM use. Participants in the present study (N =...

There has been little systematic research on therapy, rehabilitation, and social reintegration of women formerly trafficked into prostitution. This study examines characteristics and outcomes of Nepali sex trafficking survivors. Twenty case files of survivors rehabilitated in the shelter of an antitrafficking NGO were randomly selected. All individ...

South Africa has among the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world, and HIV/AIDS is closely associated with adversarial attitudes toward women and with domestic violence. This article reports the development of a social-cognitive and social-constructionist, gender-based intervention for working with HIV/AIDS patients and preventing domestic violence....

The Gender Attitudes-Power-Risk (GAPR) model of HIV risk behavior was tested using survey data collected from among 309 men who were attending STI services in a primary health care clinic in Cape Town, South Africa. Results showed that negative attitudes towards women were significantly positively associated with a high level of HIV risk behavior,...

A series of focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted exploring the beliefs of urban Nepali women about the introduction of beauty pageants to Nepal. This qualitative study examined how the competing pressures of modernization and traditionality impinge on Nepali women who are attempting to both resist patriarchal restrictions and...

This study examines gender differences in instant messaging (IM). Participants recorded their IM conversations for 3 weeks and then submitted a sample of six conversations, three with male and three with female partners. The conversations were analyzed for a number of variables often found to show gender differences. In many ways, messages were sim...

Social science research has contributed to the destigmatization of homosexuality which, in turn, has affected the topics researchers choose to study. We examined psychological research that focused on lesbians and bisexual women from 1975 to 2001 to determine if the frequency and content of this research reflect the increasingly positive view of se...

Psychologists want to know about musical expertise for two reasons. First, expert music performance is one of the highest human accomplishments, combining body knowledge, memory, and creativity in a way that very few other achievements can match. Second, knowledge of how musical expertise develops and how it works in real-time performance could be...

The links between gender roles, gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS risk are complex and culturally specific. In this qualitative study we investigated how women and men in two black communities in the Western Cape, South Africa, constructed their gender identities and roles, how they understood gender-based violence, and what they believed about th...

When a woman says “I am a feminist” what does she mean? What do other people think she means? We asked 71 women to complete the Feminist Perspectives Scale (Henley, Meng, O'Brien, McCarthy, & Sockloskie, 1998) from their own perspective and from the perspective of a “typical feminist.” Women who self-identified as feminists had stronger beliefs tha...

Brown (1989) proposed that lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals possess greater “normative creativity” and flexibility than heterosexuals because they have fewer norms for living in heterosexually dominated society. In this article we explore one possible individual difference between heterosexuals and nonheterosexuals in the domain of normative...

Two large empirical studies examined bisexuality among self-identified heterosexual college students in three regions of the United States. For women college students, the rate of bisexuality was fairly consistent across both studies and the three geographic regions sampled with approximately 30% reporting same-sex feelings. The findings for hetero...

Relationship self-help advice often blames women for relationship difficulties and endorses relatively traditional gender roles. Its appeal to female consumers is thus somewhat puzzling. This paper uses critical feminist discourse analysis to explore two Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus relationship self-help texts. Both these texts construc...

Social identity theory suggests that feminist identity should predict engagement in collective action on behalf of women. We examined predictors of collective action by asking female college students (N = 215) to complete a set of questionnaires that measure life experiences, beliefs about feminism and collective action, feminist self-labeling, and...

Note: Full Text Is Copyrighted and Not Available through This Site. We wrote this book to share our excitement about the psychology of women and gender. Psychology is in the midst of a transformation into a more balanced and inclusive body of theory, research, and practice. Contemporary feminism has provided psychology with a wealth of new theoreti...

We have all experienced the fascination and awe of witnessing a world class performance, whether a musician in a virtuoso rendition, an ice skater making triple axel leaps, or a kayaker hurtling down a class six rapid. And most of us have marveled at the skill that makes such feats possible. For example, the performance of even a moderately complex...

This critical review of research on gender and humor describes a theoretically and pragmatically fruitful framework for studying the intersection of these topics. Gender is conceived as a system of meanings that influences access to power, status, and material resources. Humor is conceived as a mode of discourse and a strategy for social interactio...

This historical overview of the field of psychology of women and gender emphasizes developments since the beginning of the second wave of feminism (c. 1970). Feminists in psychology have addressed deficiencies and inaccuracies in psychology's knowledge base, challenged biases in clinical practice and research methods, and policies of professional o...

Considerable research has shown that people have stereotypical beliefs about the speech and communication style of women and men. There is less research about stereotypes of Black people's speech, and none that jointly or comparably investigates communication stereotypes as a function of both gender and race. In this study, White college students (...

Contents: Series Editor's Foreword. Preface. In the Green Room. Improvisations. In the Words of the Masters: Artists' Accounts of Their Experience. Expert Memory. The Way to Carnegie Hall. Lessons From J.S. Bach: Stages of Practice. In the Words of the Artist. Effects of Musical Complexity on Practice. Memory and Performance. Stages of Practice Rev...

What factors predict self-identification as a feminist? College women (N = 233) were given measures of feminist ideology, feminist identity development, evaluation of feminists, collectivism and individualism. Feminist identification was measured both as a dichotomous and a continuous variable. Measured dichotomously, feminist self-identification w...

For as long as feminism has been a social movement, language has been a battleground. With the emergence of second­wave feminism in the late 1960s, feminist scholars and activists alike drew attention to how language shapes social reality and how it can be an agent of change. Language and naming are sources of power (M. Crawford & Unger, 2000). Asp...

This study examines data from questionnaires to establish the prevalence and correlates of women's binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks per episode, at women's colleges (n = 508) and at coeducational colleges (n = 9,624). Results showed that women at women's colleges binged less frequently, had fewer alcohol-related problems, experienced...

When Ms. was first introduced as an alternative to Miss or Mrs. it was perceived as a radical feminist innovation. Today, its use is unremarkable, even normative. This study examines two aspects of the meaning of Ms.: changes in its connotative meaning over time, and its current comparability to other titles. Female (n = 83) and male (n = 54) colle...

A great deal of research has focused on delineating the nature and extent of sex differences in cognitive abilities and performance. However, recent research and theory suggest that cognition may be much more socially situated than psychology has recognized. Distinguishing “sex” from “gender” places sex difference research in a context that conceiv...

To understand the content and function of gender stereotypes, students in a psychology of women course read a typical Harlequin-style romance novel of their choice. They write a paper analyzing its messages about femininity, masculinity, love, and relationships as well as addressing why women write and read these books. Later, students use their gr...

Recent research has demonstrated that people hold beliefs about how well others perform everyday memory tasks according to another's sex. For example, meta-memory ratings indicate that other men and other women are believed to differ in their success at performing certain memory tasks (Crawford, Herrmann, Holdsworth, Randall & Robbins, 1989). In th...

We wrote this book to share our excitement about feminist psychology. This book is explicitly feminist in its approach. Four themes have been integrated throughout the book and synthesized in its final chapter. These themes are: gender as a social construction rather than a biological fact; the importance of language as a source of power in sci...

Empirical research on humor has perpetuated, rather than challenged, stereotypes of the humorless female. Among other biases, it has neglected participants' own definitions of “sense of humor” and their own accounts of their preferences and practices. In this study, 203 participants (72 males, 131 females) answered a 68-item Humor Questionnaire and...

Previous research suggests that female students participate less often and less assertively than male students in college classrooms, and that teachers' discriminatory behaviors are partly responsible. Two in-class surveys of college students (N = 1375)—one at a university and one at a small college—assessed perceptions of student-teacher interacti...

A selection of recent (post-1980) works on feminist theory and method, this bibliography includes literature from psychology and other social sciences, feminist studies, and philosophy of science. The first of its four sections concerns epistemology and metatheory. The second lists works that offer reformulations or critical analyses of key concept...

Beliefs about subjects’ own memory performances and about the memory performances of others were studied as a function of gender in two experiments. Both experiments used adaptations of the Inventory of Memory Experiences (IME) that employed somewhat different response scales. The first experiment used a small sample, heterogeneous with respect to...

Recent work on the psychology of gender is pluralistic, stemming from varied specialty areas within psychology, grounded in several intellectual frameworks, and reflecting a spectrum of feminist perspectives. This article is a critical appraisal of diverse approaches to the study of women and gender. It first describes prefeminist or “womanless” ps...

A conceptual and methodological critique of recent research on the social evaluation of assertive speech demonstrates that while the research is internally valid within its narrow sphere, it lacks ecological validity, cannot adequately explain important phenomena such as gender differences, and leads to misguided clinical prescriptions. An alternat...

Reviews the book, Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A Social-Role Interpretation by Alice H. Eagly (see record 1987-97607-000 ). The purpose of Eagly's book, based on her John M. MacEachern Memorial lecture series at the University of Alberta, is threefold. Eagly sets forth the theoretical justification and methodological procedures for meta-anal...