If the avg person has the attention span of a goldfish, who is going to read this? I know, shorter = better. But a) I would be a bad academic (I have a graduate degree in psych) if I didn’t do articles justice, and b) I am so, so passionate and want you to be too!
So…
Salvatore and Marecek did four interesting studies exploring gender-differentiated patterns of weight-lifting.
You know I love strength training, and the authors mention some of its health benefits. Physically, it slows down aging, increases metabolism, increases fitness, and helps prevent osteoporosis. Psychologically, it helps with depression and some research has shown what I have experienced: that it helps with eating disorders and body image. I am a little surprised they did not talk more about the benefits, as the paper is concerned with weight lifting, but okay. Those are a few.
First, they acknowledge (assume?) that men value strength and want to build muscle, whereas women value thinness and want to “burn fat” and “tone.”
For studies 1 and 2, subjects were 56 female undergraduates.
In study 1, they wanted to see if there was a shared social knowledge linking the genders to have different fitness goals and to perform different exercises. The researchers were interested in culture-level associations.
The second study presented subjects as being part of one of two scenarios: the first lifting (specifically bench pressing), and the second, cardio (specifically the StairMaster). Afterwards, subjects completed measures on evaluation concern (whether they anticipated being negatively evaluated) and how characteristic it was for each gender to perform both types of exercising, what they did (lift or cardio) and which would be most advantageous to achieving their goals.
Results showed that women thought of bench pressing as more characteristic of men, that they thought of the StairMaster as more of a female exercise and they themselves used it more often than they benched, and that they would more likely reach their goal by doing so.
Subjects also reported more evaluation concerns for weight lifting vs cardio, and the greater the evaluation concern, the greater the disparity between reports of usefulness of benching and the time they spent doing it. No such relationship existed for cardio.
After reading about the procedures and results from studies 1 and 2, I had a few thoughts.
First, I hated that everything was about “muscle building” or “burning fat.” I kind of think that’s BS, but point taken.
I also think maybe avg BMI would have been relevant based on their hypotheses and these specific studies (i.e., I am not saying I think there is necessarily any correlation between BMI and the decision to lift, but rather, that it seems relevant here). If a hypothesis is that females would have less evaluation concerns for the StairMaster even when the scenario used said the males on the StairMaster seemed “really in shape,” and they thought women valued thinness and that cardio would help them achieve this, perhaps the women were thin and felt a high degree of confidence or self-efficacy, which would be a confounding variable.
As well, I am not sure why they chose bench pressing to depict weight lifting in general. Even among women who casually lift, benching isn’t done as often. Chest doesn’t take precendence, and while I still think the results might have been similar, it would have been interesting had they used a bi or tri exercise, for example, or a leg exercise that might be more neutral. Plus, a lot of women who semi-lift either only use machines or use dumbbells, not a bar you load plates on (so if they wanted to use chest, general “chest press,” which could include the (lousy) chest press machine or db press, would have been better).
Study 3 had two parts.
A difference in Study 3 is that both men and women were included. Subjects were 61 undergraduate students (not at the same school in which studies 1 and 2 took place).
First they looked at comfort level in the gym, equipment used, and if gender-differences are a result of the cultural background (Study 1). They used a questionnaire about cardio, machines and free weights, the frequency with which they used them (ranging from never or once a year up to 3+ times a week) and about comfort level.
There was no gender difference in gym usage, although women reported being less comfortable than men. Women used weight machines and free weights less than men and felt less comfortable. For cardio, results for use and comfort were similar.
Lastly, the researchers wanted to see what the cause of discomfort in the gym was and provided subjects with an open-ended question, asking about a single incident, however, many of the 37 (25 women, 12 men) who responded wrote about ongoing problems. Regardless, the difficulties were always emotional and not physical.
Coders put responses into 3 categories: 1) concerns about evaluation by others, 2) concerns about comparison (by self), and 3) concerns about ineptitude.
11 women and 1 man wrote about evaluation concerns on bodily appearance and competence. One women wrote, “…It’s hard to already feel uncomfortable, like it isn’t your place to use (i.e., only athletes can) and also know that people criticize the bodies of people in there when they are so vulnerable.”
More men than women had comparison concerns, feeling like other guys were bigger and stronger and like they didn’t measure up.
There was no gender difference in ineptitude concerns.
There might be an self-perpetuating cycles that exist: 1) Evaluation concerns about “gender-typing” prevents women from bench pressing more often, which in turn leads to a lower ability to press, creating additional evaluation concerns because others can see skill (improper use of equipment and/or bad form) and strength (amount of weight lifted), leading to even more decreased activity, and decreased competence, furthering decreased activity, ultimately strengthening the gender-typing! 2) They think lifting is more male-dominated which is shown, in part, by more men than women being in the lifting area, reaffirming the gender coding of strength training vs cardio and what a woman should be doing in the gym, perpetuating a woman’s avoidance of lifting. 3) The less women lift, the more likely it is that they won’t be as skilled, and if they feel like they’re incompetent, their evaluation concerns will be hightened, causing them to avoid lifting more.
Formally, we have Title IX, but informally, there are still barriers keeping women out of the weight room.
How do we fix this?
The authors suggest that appealing to its health benefits are not sufficient, but rather, we need to address the evaluative concerns. They say, “[t]he critical incidents that women reported suggest that their evaluation concerns often were produced and sustained by every day social relations in the gyms, including objectifying discourses, overt evaluative commentary by men, and exclusionary practices. Therefore, we favor interventions that aim to interrupt such practices.”
I’d add that we appeal to their concern for their physique and emphasize what lifting can do for them, as well as focus on the psychological benefits, such as, as said, increased body image.
randi morse, randi.morse@gmail.com, newton, ma
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