Nearly forty years after the passage of the Sex Discrimination and the Equal Pay Acts in the UK, and after similar legislative and judicial interventions in other jurisdictions around the world, women and men are still – by and large – following traditionally gendered educational and work careers. Everywhere, women, on average, earn less than men. (In Japan, for example, the International Federation of Business and Professional Women calculated that the wage difference between men and women was 29.4 per cent.) Women also remain significantly under-represented in the top jobs – including those fields of employment traditionally dominated by women. So, are women and men basically different kinds of people? Are they ‘programmed’ with different natural skills and abilities, things that we might call ‘masculinity’ and femininity’? And can these differences explain the continuing gender inequalities in our societies, or should we look for alternative explanations? If ‘gender’ is thought of as ‘the social significance of sex’, can the work of psychologists – alongside thinking from related disciplines – make sense of the apparently stubborn differences, divisions, and inequalities that continue to separate men and women in the twenty-first century?

This new four-volume collection from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Psychology series addresses these and other urgent questions by bringing together the best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship on gender and psychology. And as serious academic and practical thinking continues to develop, the collection also enables users to navigate the rapidly growing, and ever more complex, corpus of literature.

With a full index, and thoughtful introductions newly written by the editor, Gender and Psychology will be valued by scholars, students, and professionals in the field as a vital and enduring resource.