The Role of Psychology Research in Understanding the Sex/Gender Paradox in Music - Plus Ca Change...

Abstract

In this article we seek to assess the usefulness of the work done by psychologists to explain the sex/gender paradox in music. Whilst not pretending to be an exhaustive review, by tracing the quest as it has been tackled over the past 80 or so years, the principal issues to emerge fall into two categories. On the one hand there are areas in which clear gains appear to have been made, highlighting preferences such as those for different musical characteristics, styles and particular instruments, and the contribution made by investigating personality traits. On the other, however, there are important influences which contribute to gender formation which have remained largely unexplored in music education research, such as race/ethnicity, class and home circumstances, sexuality, disability, birth ordinal position and birth date, as well as the frustratingly inconclusive studies of the functions of brain lateralisation. Thus we reason that psychologists researching music education need to widen their attention to aspects of both difference and absence, acknowledging the real world contexts in which people make musical meanings.