Social role associated with gender
A gender role, or sex role, is a set of socially accepted behaviors and attitudes deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity.
The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may vary among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures. In addition, gender roles (and perceived gender roles) vary based on a person's race or ethnicity.
Gender roles influence a wide range of human behavior, often including the clothing a person chooses to wear, the profession a person pursues, manner of approach to things, the personal relationships a person enters, and how they behave within those relationships. Although gender roles have evolved and expanded, they traditionally keep women in the "private" sphere, and men in the "public" sphere.
Various groups, most notably feminist movements, have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive, inaccurate, and sexist.
Background.
A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles can be linked with essentialism, the idea that humans have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity based on their gender. Sociologists tend to use the term "gender role" instead of "sex role", because the sociocultural understanding of gender is distinguished from biological conceptions of sex.
In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed "gender socialization".
Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy/man and girl/woman), others recognize more. Some non-Western societies have three genders: men, women, and a third gender. Buginese society has identified five genders. Androgyny has sometimes also been proposed as a third gender. An androgyne or androgynous person is someone with qualities pertaining to both the male and female gender. Some individuals identify with no gender at all.
Many transgender people identify simply as men or women, and do not constitute a separate third gender. Biological differences between (some) trans women and cisgender women have historically been treated as relevant in certain contexts, especially those where biological traits may yield an unfair advantage, such as sport.
"Gender role" is not the same thing as "gender identity", which refers to the internal sense of one's own gender, whether or not it aligns with categories offered by societal norms. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role.
Theories of gender as a social construct.
According to social constructionism, gendered behavior is mostly due to social conventions. Theories such as "evolutionary psychology" disagree with that position.
Most children learn to categorize themselves by gender by the age of three. From birth, in the course of gender socialization, children learn gender stereotypes and roles from their parents and environment. Traditionally, boys learn to manipulate their physical and social environment through physical strength or dexterity, while girls learn to present themselves as objects to be viewed. Social constructionists argue that differences between male and female behavior are better attributable to gender-segregated children's activities than to any essential, natural, physiological, or genetic predisposition.
As an aspect of role theory, gender role theory "treats these differing distributions of women and men into roles as the primary origin of sex-differentiated social behavior, [and posits that] their impact on behavior is mediated by psychological and social processes." According to Gilbert Herdt, gender roles arose from correspondent inference, meaning that general labor division was extended to gender roles.
Social constructionists consider gender roles to be hierarchical and patriarchal. The term patriarchy, according to researcher Andrew Cherlin, defines "a social order based on the domination of women by men, especially in agricultural societies".
According to Eagly et al., the consequences of gender roles and stereotypes are sex-typed social behavior because roles and stereotypes are both socially-shared descriptive norms and prescriptive norms.
Judith Butler, in works such as "Gender Trouble" and "Undoing Gender", contends that being female is not "natural" and that it appears natural only through repeated performances of gender; these performances, in turn, reproduce and define the traditional categories of sex and/or gender.
Major theorists.
Talcott Parsons.
Working in the United States in 1955, Talcott Parsons developed a model of the nuclear family, which at that place and time was the prevalent family structure. The model compared a traditional contemporaneous view of gender roles with a more liberal view. The Parsons model was used to contrast and illustrate extreme positions on gender roles, i.e., gender roles described in the sense of Max Weber's ideal types (an exaggerated and simplified version of a phenomenon, used for analytical purposes) rather than how they appear in reality. Model A described a total separation of male and female roles, while Model B described the complete dissolution of gender roles.
The model is consciously a simplification; individuals' actual behavior usually lies somewhere between these poles. According to the interactionist approach, gender roles are not fixed but are constantly renegotiated between individuals.
Geert Hofstede.
Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher and social psychologist who dedicated himself to the study of culture, sees culture as "broad patterns of thinking, feeling and acting" in a society In Hofstede's view, most human cultures can themselves be classified as either masculine or feminine. Masculine culture clearly distinguishes between gender roles, directing men to "be assertive, tough, and focused on material success," and women to "be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life." Feminine cultures tolerate overlapping gender roles, and instruct that "both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life."
Hofstede's "Feminine and Masculine Culture Dimensions" states:
Masculine cultures expect men to be assertive, ambitious and competitive, to strive for material success, and to respect whatever is big, strong, and fast. Masculine cultures expect women to serve and care for the non-material quality of life, for children and for the weak. Feminine cultures, on the other hand, define relatively overlapping social roles for the sexes, in which, in particular, men need not be ambitious or competitive but may go for a different quality of life than material success; men may respect whatever is small, weak, and slow.
In feminine cultures, modesty and relationships are important characteristics. This differs from masculine cultures, where self-enhancement leads to self-esteem. Masculine cultures are individualistic and feminine cultures are more collective because of the significance of personal relationships.
'The dominant values in a masculine society are achievement and success; the dominant values in a feminine society are caring for others and quality of life'.
John Money.
"In the 1950s, John Money and his colleagues took up the study of intersex individuals, who, Money realized, 'would provide invaluable material for the comparative study for bodily form and physiology, rearing, and psychosexual orientation'." "Money and his colleagues used their own studies to state in the extreme what these days seems extraordinary for its complete denial of the notion of natural inclination."
They concluded that gonads, hormones, and chromosomes did not automatically determine a child's gender role. Among the many terms Money coined was "gender role," which he defined in a seminal 1955 paper as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."
In recent years, the majority of Money's theories regarding the importance of socialization in the determination of gender have come under intense criticism, especially in connection with the inaccurate reporting of success in the "John/Joan" case, later revealed to be David Reimer.
West and Zimmerman.
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman developed an interactionist perspective on gender beyond its construction of "roles." For them, gender is "the product of social doings of some sort undertaken by men and women whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production." This approach is described by Elisabeth K. Kelan as an "ethnomethodological approach" which analyzes "micro interactions to reveal how the objective and given nature of the world is accomplished," suggesting that gender does not exist until it is empirically perceived and performed through interactions. West and Zimmerman argued that the use of "role" to describe gender expectations conceals the production of gender through everyday activities. Furthermore, they stated that roles are situated identities, such as "nurse" and "student," which are developed as the situation demands, while gender is a master identity with no specific site or organizational context. For them, "conceptualizing gender as a role makes it difficult to assess its influence on other roles and reduces its explanatory usefulness in discussions of power and inequality." West and Zimmerman consider gender an individual production that reflects and constructs interactional and institutional gender expectations.
Biological factors.
Historically, gender roles have been largely attributed to biological differences in men and women. Although research indicates that biology plays a role in gendered behavior, the extent of its effects on gender roles is less clear.
One hypothesis attributes differences in gender roles to evolution. The sociobiological view argues that men's fitness is increased by being aggressive, allowing them to compete with other men for access to females, as well as by being sexually promiscuous and trying to father as many children as possible. Women are benefited by bonding with infants and caring for children. Sociobiologists argue that these roles are evolutionary and led to the establishment of traditional gender roles, with women in the domestic sphere and men dominant in every other area. However, this view pre-assumes a view of nature that is contradicted by the fact that women engage in hunting in 79% of modern hunter-gatherer societies. However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict the wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies".
Another hypothesis attributes differences in gender roles to prenatal exposure to hormones. Early research examining the effect of biology on gender roles by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt primarily focused on girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), resulting in higher-than-normal prenatal exposure to androgens. Their research found that girls with CAH exhibited tomboy-like behavior, were less interested in dolls, and were less likely to make-believe as parents. A number of methodological problems with the studies have been identified. A study on 1950s American teenage girls who had been exposed to androgenic steroids by their mothers "in utero" exhibited more traditionally masculine behavior, such as being more concerned about their future career than marriage, wearing pants, and not being interested in jewelry.
Sociologist Linda L. Lindsey critiqued the notion that gender roles are a result of prenatal hormone exposure, saying that while hormones may explain sex differences like sexual orientation and gender identity, they "cannot account for gender differences in other roles such as nurturing, love, and criminal behavior". By contrast, some research indicates that both neurobiological and social risk factors can interact in a way that predisposes one to engaging in criminal behavior (including juvenile delinquency).
With regard to gender stereotypes, the societal roles and differences in power between men and women are much more strongly indicated than is a biological component.
Culture.
Ideas of appropriate gendered behavior vary among cultures and era, although some aspects receive more widespread attention than others. In the "World Values Survey", responders were asked if they thought that wage work should be restricted to only men in the case of shortage in jobs: in Iceland the proportion that agreed with the proposition was 3.6%; while in Egypt it was 94.9%.
Attitudes have also varied historically. For example, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, women were commonly associated with roles related to medicine and healing. Because of the rise of witch-hunts across Europe and the institutionalization of medicine, these roles became exclusively associated with men. In the last few decades, these roles have become largely gender-neutral in Western society.
Vern Bullough stated that homosexual communities are generally more tolerant of switching gender roles. For instance, someone with a masculine voice, a five o'clock shadow (or a fuller beard), an Adam's apple, wearing a woman's dress and high heels, carrying a purse would most likely draw ridicule or other unfriendly attention in ordinary social contexts.
Because the dominant class sees this form of gender expression as unacceptable, inappropriate, or perhaps threatening,