Gender Differences in Coping with Stress

• Research suggests that males and females respond differently to acute stress and that each gender copes differently with chronic stress and that each gender prefers different types of social support during stress
• Response to stress - under acute stress, males will show a fight or flight response while women will show a tend and befriend reaction
  • Biological explanation - females produce more oxytocin, a hormone released from the pituitary gland that promotes nurturing and co-operation
  • Social learning theory explanation - females are socialised to take care of family and friends in circumstances that seem to pose a risk 
• Coping strategies - if the stress becomes chronic, females will favour emotion-focused coping (managing their responses) while males favour problem-focused coping (trying to eliminate the stressor)
• Social support - females prefer an empathetic listener, while males prefer practical assistance and information and females also have more social support networks than males, which is linked to their tend and befriend response

Gender differences in coping with stress.

Emotion-focused (females)	Problem-focused (males)
Reduce stress indirectly by tackling anxiety associated with the stressor	Reduce stress directly by tackling root causes
Use distraction and keep busy	Take control to remove or escape from the stressor
Use cognitive appraisal to restructure thinking about the stressor	Learn new skills such as time-management

• The distinction between problem and emotion focused coping was first made by Lazarus and Folkman (1984)

Under stress, women tend and befriend, using social support and emotion-focused coping.

Research which investigates gender differences in coping with stress

• Matud (2004) conducted a large survey of 2816 people and found that women scored significantly higher than the men in chronic stress, appraised their stress as less controllable than men did and engaged in more emotion-focused coping than men
• Ptacek et al. (2014) found that females used more social support and emotion-focused coping strategies with an achievement-related stressor (giving a lecture in school before a large audience) than males, who used more problem-focused coping strategies

Evaluation of gender differences in coping with stress

Strengths

• Understanding the gender differences in coping with stress, allows us to investigate their efficacy further (as the personal control men take over stressors is effective, but so is women’s use of social networks), and select the best coping strategies from each
• Research supports the theory that men and women use different coping strategies

Weaknesses

• Dividing the way that people cope with stress by gender ignores individual differences and may create self-fulfilling prophecies where people react in the way they think they ought to because of their gender
• Findings of gender differences in coping strategies are often based on self-report measures that may show participant bias and therefore need validating by method triangulation

Link to Approaches:

Gender differences in coping with stress are linked to the biological approach, with the argument that it is the high level of the hormone oxytocin that provokes the tend and befriend response to stress that is typical of females. However, the theory of gender difference resulting in emotion-focused coping and problem-focused coping comes from cognitive appraisal theory (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984) and is linked to the cognitive approach to behaviour.

Link to Issues and Debates:

Research may exaggerate differences between men’s and women’s responses to stress and how they cope with stress (Alpha bias)