Gender Roles

11 Key excerpts on "Gender Roles"

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  Childhood Socialization

  • Gerald Handel(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  VII Socialization to Gender

  The division of the human species into male and female sexes, which gives men and women complementary roles in biological reproduction, has been interpreted in all societies as having wider social significance. Most significantly, men tend to hold more power than women. Their activities tend to be considered more important than women's, and therefore they tend to have more prestige. Many occupations are sex-typed, so that some are deemed more suitable for men, others more suitable for women, although still others may be equally open to either. Behavioral expectations often differ, as well. For example, women are allowed to be "more emotional" than men, except in the expression of anger, which is more fully allowed men.

  All of these expectations that are attributed by sex, connected not directly to reproduction but viewed as socially appropriate concomitants, have long been discussed under the concept of sex role. A growing realization that many of the concomitants have nothing to do with sex or reproduction but are social beliefs—which denigrate and subordinate women—led to a new terminological distinction between sex and gender. Some scholars no longer use the term sex role at all. Lipman-Blumen (1984) finds a use for and retains it, however, as well as adopting the now widely used term gender role. She defines each as follows: "sex roles, to refer specifically to behaviors determined by an individual's biological sex, such as menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, erection, orgasm, and seminal ejaculation" (p. 2). "Gender Roles encompass all those cultural expectations associated with masculinity or femininity that go beyond biological sex differences" (p. 3).

  By differentiating gender and sex, it becomes easier to recognize that gender is, to a significant degree, the product of social institutions and of socialization. Though institutions are resistant to change, they nonetheless are demonstrably more modifiable than the biological division of the human species into male and female.

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  Encyclopedia of Group Processes and Intergroup Relations

  • John M Levine, Michael A. Hogg, John M. Levine, Michael Hogg(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Research has thus shown that people who have self-concepts that differ from those that are typical of people of their sex are less likely to show traditionally sex-typed behavior. Origins of Gender Roles Gender Roles form an important part of the culture and social structure of every society. Although the 303 Gender Roles ascription of agentic qualities to men and commu-nal qualities to women is widely shared across world cultures, beliefs about the proper relation-ships between women and men vary widely. Traditional ideologies endorse the dominance of men over women, whereas modern ideologies endorse more egalitarian relationships. Gender ideology is generally more modern in more devel-oped, urbanized nations. According to Wood and Eagly’s biosocial model, even though Gender Roles are products of the cul-ture, they are not arbitrary cultural constructions but are rooted in a society’s division of labor between the sexes. The differing distributions of men and women into social roles form the basis for Gender Roles. Thus, the typical division of labor in industrialized nations assigns a disproportionate share of domestic activities to women and of other activities to men. Mainly women occupy the domestic role, somewhat more men than women occupy the employee role, and women are more likely than men to be part-time employees. Although most women are employed in the paid labor force in the United States and many other industrialized nations, women and men tend to be employed in different occupations in a somewhat sex-segregated labor force. The link between Gender Roles and the male– female division of labor follows from the principle that men and women are expected to have attributes that equip them for their sex-typical roles.

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  Praeger Guide to the Psychology of Gender

  • Michele A. Paludi(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  At an individual level, roles exist in people's minds as schemata, or abstract knowledge structures, about groups of people. Although schemata may vary between individuals, role schemata are generally held consensually within societies, existing as shared ideologies that are commu- nicated among society members. Gender Roles constitute shared expectations about behavior that apply to people on the basis of their socially identified sex (Eagly, 1987). Because Gender Roles apply to the general categories of male and female, they are dif- fuse, or broadly relevant across situations. More specific roles based on fac- tors such as family relationships (e.g., mother, son) and occupation (e.g., nurse, carpenter) are primarily relevant only in a particular context and to some people. Gender Roles therefore combine with more specific social roles to structure interaction in a given situation (Ridgeway, 2001). For example, workplace occupational roles, such as a manager, and Gender Roles may both influence expectations for behavior. Therefore, a female manager and a male manager, although in the same occupational role, are subject to somewhat different expectations (Eagly & Karau, 2002). Male managers, more than fe- male managers, are expected to be self-confident, assertive, firm, and ana- lytical (Heilman et al., 1989). Evidence supporting the existence of Gender Roles comes most directly from research on gender stereotypes, which has consistently found that people have differing beliefs about the typical characteristics of men and women (e.g., Diekman & Eagly, 2000; Newport, 2001). An important aspect of these differing expectations consists of women being viewed as more communal than men and men as more agentic than women. Communal char- acteristics reflect a caring concern for other people and involve affection, kindness, interpersonal sensitivity, and nurturance. Agentic characteristics, on the other hand, involve assertion, control, and confidence.

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  Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology

  Volume Two

  • Paul A M Van Lange, Arie W Kruglanski, E Tory Higgins, Paul A M Van Lange, Arie W Kruglanski, E Tory Higgins, Author(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Because Gender Roles are shared, people correctly believe that others are likely to react more approvingly to behavior that is consistent rather than inconsistent with these roles. Therefore, the most likely route to a smoothly functioning social interaction is to behave consistently with one’s gender role or at least to avoid strongly deviating from it. In summary, Gender Roles are emergent from the activities carried out by individuals of each sex in their typical occupational and family roles. To the extent that women more than men occupy roles that are facilitated by predominantly communal behaviors, domes-tic behaviors, or subordinate behaviors, cor-responding attributes become stereotypic of women and part of the female gender role. To the extent that men more than women occupy roles that require predominantly agentic behaviors, resource acquisition behaviors, or dominant behaviors, the corresponding attributes become stereotypic of men and part of the male gender role. These Gender Roles, which are an important focus of social-ization, begin to be acquired early in child-hood and are elaborated throughout childhood and adolescence (e.g., Bussey and Bandura, 1999; Miller et al., 2006). Gender Roles’ influence on behavior How do Gender Roles influence behavior? As Wood and Eagly (2010) argued, Gender Roles work through a trio of biosocial mechanisms to influence behavior in role-appropriate directions. These proximal causes of male and female behavior include biological proc-esses involving hormonal changes and socio-cultural factors of gender identity and others’ stereotypic expectations. These three factors interact to yield both gender differences and similarities. Influence of hormonal processes Gender Roles and specific social roles guide behavior in part through the activation of hormonal changes, especially in testosterone and oxytocin (Wood and Eagly, 2010).

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  Family Diversity

  Collection of the 3rd European Congress of Family Science

  • Olaf Kapella, Christiane Rille-Pfeiffer, Marina Rupp, Norbert F. Schneider, Olaf Kapella, Christiane Rille-Pfeiffer, Marina Rupp, Norbert F. Schneider(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Verlag Barbara Budrich

    (Publisher)

  In doing so, I take the liberty of restricting myself to a few key aspects, especially in view of the fact that Regina Becker-Schmidt (2005) recently produced a current and differentiated de-scription of how the sex and gender role concept developed in women’s and gender stud-ies, to which study I make express reference 2 . My object in this paper is rather to take stock on the basis of the development history and outline where scientists studying sex/Gender Roles are currently posited and where there is a need for further research. So let’s launch ourselves chronologically with some aspects which had in the past acted as a source of friction between feminist research and mainstream research and which have since – I hope – mostly become state of the art in mainstream research. “Sex roles” We will start out from the definition. When women’s studies first got going, many of its projects involving issues of sex-specific work-sharing at home and in the labour market, especially in the US, were based on role theory concepts (Becker-Schmidt 2000). At first glance, the underlying role concept appears to be both logical and clearly defined: “Sex roles prescribe the different ways men and women are supposed to act and the different tasks they are expected to undertake” (Scott/Marshall (eds) 2005, A dictionary of Sociology, “sex roles”). “[Sex roles] are sets of expectations and other ideas about how females and males are supposed to think, feel, appear, and behave in relation to other people.” (Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology 2000, “sex and gender”). Yet there are basically two different angles of how the sex role concept is approached (cf. Fig. 1). For one we have the structural theory approaches that refer to roles as being in-stitutionalised clusters of normative rights and duties and that concentrate on the struc-tural embedding of roles in the organisational fabric of societies.

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  The School Years

  • John Coleman(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It should serve a descriptive function of documenting actual behaviour. Unfortunately, gender norms have historically and sociologically been defined as the societal prescriptions of what the ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ are for each sex, equating ‘norms’ with external dictates. With this historical and sociological usage, ‘gender norms are the prescriptive guidelines that form the Gender Roles’ (Doyle 1985: 88). Gender stereotypes are oversimplified ‘socially shared beliefs that certain qualities can be assigned to individuals, based on their membership in the female or male half of the human race’ (Lips 1988: 2). Thus males share one cluster of traits, to include as examples aggression and objectivity, while females share another, to include emotionality and passivity, etc. Gender stereotypes are a rigid and simplified version of Gender Roles that provide little or no flexibility for individual difference. Gender identity 2 has been described in terms of process as well as product. The process refers to decision-making as to whether and to what degree these externally defined Gender Roles are appropriate to one’s self-definition (Archer 1985). One begins to formulate a gender identity in childhood. At that time the individual primarily accumulates, and clusters into schemas by ‘boy versus girl’, the messages provided by significant others in one’s society. The evaluative component of gender definition largely emerges during adolescence, and becomes increasingly refined throughout the adult years

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  Educating the Other

  Gender, Power and Schooling

  • Dr Carrie Paechter, Carrie Paechter(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gender dimorphism, including biological dimorphism, is constructed for particular ends; power relations between men and women in Western society require an exaggeration of the differences between them (McNay, 1992; Connell, 1987; di Stefano, 1990). Perceived biological differences are translated into mutually-exclusive Gender Roles in which what is expected of males and females is played out. Those things particular to the masculine role (in Western society, work outside the home, aggressive behaviour) are given power and status; those to the feminine (care of children, ‘service’ jobs) are not. Generally, it would appear that the status of an occupation or preference is directly related to which gender is usually associated with it. For example, when typewriters were first invented, they were usually operated by the one or two men in an office of female clerks; typing was seen as a skilled occupation with some status. As typewriters became more widespread, more women started using them, until typing became a low-status, almost entirely feminized, occupation.

  Because gender-role differences are so intimately bound up with power relations, their construction is asymmetrical in a number of ways. In our everyday gender attributions, it is male rather than female markers that are salient; as in assignment at birth, the sign of femaleness is the absence of male cues. This is even the case for infants born with ambiguous genitalia: Kessler (1990) notes that the key indicator for the assignment of such an individual as male is the presence (or potential presence, after surgery and hormone treatment) of an adequately functioning penis; if this is not considered achievable, the child is reared as female and a vulva and vagina constructed if necessary.

  The guidelines are clear, but they focus on only one physical feature, one that is distinctly imbued with cultural meaning. This becomes especially apparent in the case of an XX infant with normal female reproductive gonads and a perfect penis. Would the size and shape of the penis, in this case, be the deciding factor in assigning the infant ‘male’, or would the perfect penis be surgically destroyed and female genitals created?… researchers concur that parents are likely to want to raise a child with a normal-shaped penis (regardless of size) as ‘male’, particularly if the scrotal area looks normal and if the parents have no experience with intersexuality…This reasoning implies…that it is preferable to remove the internal female organs, implant prosthetic testes, and regulate the ‘boy’s’ hormones for his entire life than to overlook or disregard the perfection of the penis, (pp. 18–19)

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  Women/Men/Management

  • Ann Harriman, Bloomsbury Publishing(Authors)
  • 1996(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  On personality char- 70 WOMEN/MEN/MANAGEMENT acteristics such as love, sociability, nurturance, dependency, empathy, or emotionality, areas in which males and females are perceived to differ sig- nificantly, there is very little evidence that real differences exist (Maccoby and Jacklin 1974). It is fair to say, then, that actual sex differences have been greatly ex- aggerated. However, circumstances that are perceived as real are real in their consequences. So long as these perceptions exist, differences in expe- rience are sure to follow. It is also important to bear in mind when we talk of sex differences that we are talking about statistical rather than individual differences. Differences that occur between males and females are distrib- uted over normal and overlapping curves. While men on the average may be stronger or more aggressive than women on the average, an individual woman may be stronger or more aggressive than a good percentage of the male population, or the reverse. Gender Differences: Feminine or Masculine Because our world is infinitely complex, we simplify our understanding by grouping physical and social phenomena into categories. For this reason natural scientists divide the physical world into genera, phyla, etc. Social scientists study human behavior in the forms of roles, role sets, and stere- otypes. In studying sexual behavior, social scientists look for "sex roles" and "sex-role stereotypes." A role is the expected and actual behaviors or characteristics that are associated with a particular social "status" in our society (Duberman 1975). A stereotype is the set of traits or characteristics that are attributed to all individuals who occupy a particular role. Stereo- typing occurs when the observed traits or behaviors of some members of a role group are attributed to all members of the group by the larger so- ciety.

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  Young People's Understanding of Society (Routledge Revivals)

  • Adrian Furnham(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter five Sex and gender

  Introduction

  From the moment of conception, the fertilized ovum is destined to mature into a female or male, given normal genetic determination of sex. Though the sex of an unborn human may be a matter of interest and speculation within a family, once the birth is over the sex of the baby has to be accepted. Gender is a permanent human characteristic and, until the recent past, there existed in society relatively stable notions of appropriate sex-role behaviour for the different social classes. Traditional notions of sex differences and sex roles have been challenged in various ways throughout this century, most notably by feminists and by the labour demands of war and its aftermath. In recent years some of these challenges have both stimulated and been reinforced by developmental research on sex, gender and sexuality (Hargreaves and Colley, 1987).

  In the process of becoming adult women or men, young people are affected by the gender expectation pressures, constraints, biases and demands of society, and also their own personality characteristics and abilities influence their interactions with the social environment. The young partly socialize themselves in their gender identity and sex roles as they develop during the pre-adult years, selecting from their experiences and accommodating and assimilating that material. This developmental sequence of interacting events has a natural beginning at birth, though female-male differentiation takes place during foetal development. Cultural-social differences between the sexes are maintained in part through sex roles allocated in the family, school, mass media, religion, sports, recreation, economy, and in everyday life. There is scarcely an area of social life untouched by sex typing.

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  Current research in sociology

  Published on the occasion of the VIIIth World Congress of Sociology, Toronto, Canada, August 18–24, 1974

  • Margaret S. Archer, 1974, Toronto> World Congress of Sociology World Congress of Sociology <8(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  10. SOCIOLOGY OF SEX ROLES Changing sex roles: A review of sociological research developments and needs CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN Queens College of the City University of New York INTRODUCTION Although sex-role research is not a new field, it has emerged from a step-child position as a subfield of family sociology and has gained an in-dependent focus, capturing the imagination and attention of many scholars, women scholars in particular. 1 However, the spread of topics which could legitimately come under the heading of sex-role research is almost limitless, for men and women are actors in all social situations and social systems. Thus, although the study could include changing roles of men and women in micro and macro political, economic, and religious spheres as well as the cultural sector of the arts and literature, certain spheres of inquiry and certain issues have been emphasized in the past, and continue today to engage much re-search interest. Overarching all spheres is the fact that the changing sex roles of women have received more attention than those of men. Furthermore, the study of changing sex roles of both sexes, but women, in particular, has been explored in the context of social problem oriented research and deviance, rather than normality. Since sex-role research has focused on women's roles, emphasis has centered on the sex-division of roles in the family and the interplay be-tween women's family roles and their occupational roles. 1. For an excellent review of research in this area from a different perspective, see Arlie Russell Hochschild [49]*. Janet Giele [39] has also done an interesting account including an historical section. * The numbers between brackets refer to the Bibliography at the end of this article. 284 Sociology of sex roles Within the last year or two there has been a considerable attempt to broaden the inquiry of sex-role differentiation in almost all major academ-ic disciplines.

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  Gender at Work

  A Social Psychological Perspective

  • Melanie C. Steffens, Ma. Àngels Viladot(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

    (Publisher)

  Thus, social role trumped gender when forming impressions of people. These findings corroborate what we have concluded in Chapter 3 on stereotypes: Individuating information is more important than gender when judging individuals. Contemporary Gender Roles In Western cultures, remarkable changes in Gender Roles have been observed recently. That is, the roles of men and women have become more similar over the last decades, primarily accounted for by women’s increased entry into the employee role (see Introduction for numbers). In contrast to these observations within the occupational domain, comparable changes regarding the domestic role have not taken place. A large-scale study on contemporary gender division of labor in Germany revealed that women still spend nearly twice as much time on household chores and childcare as men (Kuenzler, Walter, Reichart, & Pfister, 2001). Similarly, the German microcensus of 2005 showed that 56% of working mothers having a child younger than three years of age have taken parental leave, whereas only 3% of the working fa- thers have made use of this opportunity (German Federal Office of Statistics, 2006). Likewise, in a Gallup Poll in 2008 addressing the division of household chores within married couples living in the United States, 54% of the married respondents reported that the wife cared for the children on a daily basis, whereas only 9% reported that the husband did. A comparable distribution was found for chores such as “prepare meals” (58% vs. 14%), “do laundry” (68% vs. 10%), and “clean the house” (61% to 6%; Newport, 2008). In short, although women are increasingly found in the employee role, men have not entered domestic roles to the same degree (Shelton, 1992). A similar asym- metry can be observed within the occupational domain, in that men have not social role theory 95 entered female-dominated occupations to the same extent that women have entered male-dominated occupations (England, 2003).

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