Gender role
A gender role is a set of perceived behavioral norms associated particularly with males or females, in a given social group or system. It can be a form of division of labour by gender. It is a focus of analysis in the social sciences and humanities. Gender is one component of the gender/sex system, which refers to how biological sexuality is translated into behavior. All societies, to a certain effect, have a gender/sex system, although the components and workings of this system vary markedly from society to society.
A person's gender role is composed of several elements and can be expressed through clothing, behaviour, choice of work, personal relationships and other factors. These elements are not concrete and have evolved through time (for example women's trousers). Gender roles were traditionally divided into strictly feminine and masculine gender roles, though these roles have diversified today into many different acceptable male or female gender roles.
Theories
There are two opposing arguments regarding the development of gender roles. One side argues that gender is based in biology while their opponents say that sex is biological while gender is chosen.
Biology
Gender roles have long been a staple of the "nature versus nurture" debate. Traditional theories of gender usually assume that one's gender identity, and hence one's gender role, is a natural given. The idea that differences in gender roles originate in differences in biology has found support in parts of the scientific community. 19th-century anthropology sometimes used descriptions of the imagined life of paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies for evolutionary explanations for gender differences. For example, those accounts maintain that the need to take care of offspring may have limited the females' freedom to hunt and assume positions of power.
Due to the influence of (among others) Simone de Beauvoir's feminist works and Michel Foucault's reflections on sexuality, the idea that gender was unrelated to sex gained ground during the 1980's, especially in sociology and cultural anthropology. This view claims that a person could therefore be born with male genitals but still be of feminine gender. In 1987, R.W. Connell did extensive research on whether there are any connections between biology and gender role[1] and concluded that there were none. Most scientists reject Connell's research because concrete evidence exists proving the effect of hormones on behavior. However, hormone levels vary, and disorders can cause an intersex status. The debate continues to rage on. Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge Univ. professor of psychology and psychiatry, has said that "the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, while the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems." Some researchers, such as Bruce Lipton, believe that neural synapses in early childhood are formed due to the environment of the child, so if parents were to treat the child as to his or her assigned gender, then the brain would develop for that gender role and thus would be "hard-wired".[2] Real world cases such as David Reimer, on the other hand, show that raising a child in a cross-sex role does not cause the child to necessarily adapt to that role.
Dr. Sandra Lipsitz Bem is a psychologist who developed the gender schema theory to explain how individuals come to use gender as an organizing category in all aspects of their life. It is based on the combination of aspects of the social learning theory and the cognitive-development theory of sex role acquisition. In 1971, she created the Bem Sex Role Inventory to measure how well you fit into your traditional gender role by characterizing your personality as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. She believed that through gender-schematic processing, a person spontaneously sorts attributes and behaviors into masculine and feminine categories. Therefore, an individual processes information and regulate their behavior based on whatever definitions of femininity and masculinity their culture provides.[3]
The current trend in Western societies toward men and women sharing similar occupations, responsibilities and jobs suggests that the sex one is born with does not directly determine one's abilities. While there are differences in average capabilities of various kinds (E.g., physical strength) between the sexes, the capabilities of some members of one sex will fall within the range of capabilities needed for tasks conventionally assigned to the other sex.
Socialization
The process through which the individual learns and accepts roles is called socialization. Socialization works by encouraging wanted and discouraging unwanted behavior. These sanctions by agencies of socialization such as the family, schools, and the communication medium make it clear to the child what behavioral norms the child is expected to follow. The examples of the child's parents, siblings and teachers are typically followed. Mostly, accepted behavior is not produced by outright reforming coercion from an accepted social system. In some other cases, various forms of coercion have been used to acquire a desired response or function.
In majority of the traditional and developmental social systems, an individual has a choice to what should he or she extent as a conformed representative of a socialization process. In this voluntary process, the consequences can be beneficial or malfunctional, minor or severe for every case by a behavior's socialization influence forming gender roles or expectations institutionalizing gender differences. Typical encouragements and expectations of gender role behavior are not as a powerful difference and reforming social trait to a century ago. Such developments and traditional refineries are still a socialization process to and within family values, peer pressures, at the employment centers and in every social system communication medium.
Still, once someone has accepted certain gender roles and gender differences as an expected socialized behavioral norms, these behavior traits become part of the individual's responsibilities not influential roles in gender relationships on a personal and social levels to the individual's own socializing role or self (identity). Sanctions to unwanted behavior and role conflict can be stressful.
Talcott Parsons
Working in the United States, Talcott Parsons developed a model of the nuclear family in 1955.] (At that place and time, the nuclear family was considered to be the prevalent family structure.) It compared a strictly traditional view of gender roles (from an industrial-age American perspective) to a more liberal view.
Parsons believed that the feminine role was an expressive one, whereas the masculine role, in his view, was instrumental. He believed that expressive activities of the woman fulfill 'internal' functions, for example to strengthen the ties between members of the family. The man, on the other hand, performed the 'external' functions of a family, such as providing monetary support.
The Parsons model was used to contrast and illustrate extreme positions on gender roles. Model A describes total separation of male and female roles, while Model B describes the complete dissolution of barriers between gender roles.[4] (The examples are based on the context of the culture and infrastructure of the United States.)
| Model A - Total role segregation | Model B - Total disintegration of roles | |
| Education | Gender-specific education; high professional qualification is important only for the man | Co-educative schools, same content of classes for girls and boys, same qualification for men and women. |
| Profession | The workplace is not the primary area of women; career and professional advancement is deemed unimportant for women | For women, career is just as important as for men; Therefore equal professional opportunities for men and women are necessary. |
| Housework | Housekeeping and child care are the primary functions of the woman; participation of the man in these functions is only partially wanted. | All housework is done by both parties to the marriage in equal shares. |
| Decision making | In case of conflict, man has the last say, for example in choosing the place to live, choice of school for children, buying decisions | Neither partner dominates; solutions do not always follow the principle of finding a concerted decision; status quo is maintained if disagreement occurs. |
| Child care and education | Woman takes care of the largest part of these functions; she educates children and cares for them in every way | Man and woman share these functions equally. |
According to the interactionist approach, roles (including gender roles) are not fixed, but are constantly negotiated between individuals. In North America and southern South America, this is the most common approach among families whose business is agriculture.
Gender roles can influence all kinds of behavior, such as choice of clothing, choice of work and personal relationships; E.g., parental status (See also Sociology of fatherhood).
Culture and gender roles
Ideas of appropriate behavior according to gender vary among cultures and era, although some aspects receive more widespread attention than others. An interesting case is described by R.W. Connell in Men, Masculinities and Feminism:
- "There are cultures where it has been normal, not exceptional, for men to have homosexual relations. There have been periods in 'Western' history when the modern convention that men suppress displays of emotion did not apply at all, when men were demonstrative about their feeling for their friends. Mateship in the Australian outback last century is a case in point."
Other aspects, however, may differ markedly with time and place. In pre-industrial Europe, for example, the practice of medicine (Other than midwifery) was generally seen as a male prerogative. However, in Russia, health care was more often seen as a feminine role. The results of these views can still be seen in modern society, where European medicine is most often practiced by men, while the majority of Russian doctors are women.
In many other cases, the elements of convention or tradition seem to play a dominant role in deciding which occupations fit in with which gender roles. In the United States, physicians have traditionally been men, and the few people who defied that expectation received a special job description: "woman doctor." Similarly, there are special terms like "male nurse," "woman lawyer," "lady barber," "male secretary," etc. But in China and the former Soviet Union countries, medical doctors are predominantly women, and in the United Kingdom, Germany and Taiwan it is very common for all of the barbers in a barber shop to be women. Also, throughout history, some jobs that have been typically male or female have switched genders. For example, clerical jobs. Clerical jobs used to be considered a man's job, but when several women began filling men's job positions due to World War II, clerical jobs quickly became dominated by women. It became more feminized, and women workers became known as "typewriters" or "secretaries." There are many other jobs that have switched gender roles, and many jobs are continually evolving as far as being dominated by women or men.
It should be noted that some societies are comparatively rigid in their expectations, and other societies are comparatively permissive. Some of the gender signals that form part of a gender role and indicate one's gender identity to others are quite obvious, and others are so subtle that they are transmitted and received out of ordinary conscious awareness.
Gender roles and feminism
Most feminists argue that traditional gender roles are oppressive for women. They believe that the female gender role was constructed as an opposite to an ideal male role, and helps to perpetuate patriarchy.
Furthermore, there has been a perception of Western culture, in recent times, that the female gender role is dichotomized into either being a "stay at home-mother" or a "career woman". In reality, women usually face a double burden: The need to balance job and child care deprives women of spare time. Whereas the majority of men with university educations have a career as well as a family, only 50 percent of academic women have children. The double burden problem was introduced to scientific theory in 1956 by Myrdal and Klein in their work "Women's two roles: Home and work," published in London.
Transgendered and intersexed people
As long as a person's perceived physiological sex is consistent with that person's gender identity, the gender role of a person is so much a matter of course in a stable society that people rarely even think of it. Only in cases where, for whatever reason, an individual has a gender role that is inconsistent with his or her sex will the matter draw attention. When an individual exhibits a gender role that is discordant with his or her gender identity, it is most often done to deliberately provoke a sense of incongruity and a humorous reaction to the attempts of a person of one sex to pass himself or herself off as a member of the opposite sex.
Another example to consider is transgender people, who mix gender roles to form a personally comfortable androgynous combination or transcend the scheme of gender roles completely, regardless of their physiological sex . Transgender people can also be physically androgynous or identify as androgynous. Transsexualism also exists, where a person who is born as one sex and is brought up in that sex, but has gender identity of the opposite sex and wishes to live as that sex (but does not necessarily wish to adopt that particular gender role, depending upon whether the person in question believes that gender roles are innate).
When we consider these more unusual products of nature's inventiveness, the simple picture that we saw originally, in which there was a high degree of consistency among external genitalia, gender identity, and gender role, then dissolves into a kind of jigsaw puzzle that is difficult to put together correctly. The extra parts of this jigsaw puzzle fall into two closely related categories, atypical gender identities and atypical gender roles.
In Western society, there is a growing acceptance of intersexed and transgendered people. However, there are some who do not accept these people and may react violently and persecute them: this kind of negative value judgment is sometimes known as transphobia. Nevertheless, such cases of mismatch between a person's physiology, identity and role are rare. A large majority of people have matching genitalia and gender identities. For many people their gender role is commensurate with their genitalia.
Sexual orientation and gender roles
Traditional gender roles include male attraction to females, and vice versa. Gay, lesbian and bisexual people, among others, usually do not conform to these expectations. An active conflict over the cultural acceptability of non-heterosexuality rages worldwide. The belief or assumption that heterosexual relationships and acts are "normal" is described—largely by the opponents of this viewpoint—as heterosexism or in queer theory, heteronormativity.
Perhaps it is an attempt to reconcile this conflict that leads to a common assumption that one same-sex partner assumes a pseudo-male gender role and the other assumes a pseudo-female role. For a gay male relationship, this might lead to the assumption that the "wife" handled domestic chores, was the receptive sexual partner in anal sex, adopted effeminate mannerisms, and perhaps even dressed in women's clothing. This assumption is flawed, as many homosexual couples tend to have more equal roles, and the effeminate behavior of some gay men is usually not adopted consciously, and is often more subtle. Feminine or masculine behaviors in some homosexual people might be a product of the socialization process, adopted unconsciously due to stronger identification with the opposite sex during development. The role of both this process and the role of biology is debated. The existence of these separate identities (dominant masculine vs more passive feminine), where present, can establish the dynamics of the relationship, according to the heterosexual patterns; this is not always the case, especially in relationships with less clearly defined sexual/identity roles. A related assumption is that all androphilic people, including gay men, should or do adopt feminine mannerisms and other gender-role elements, and that all gynophilic people, including lesbians, should or do adopt masculine mannerisms and other gender-role elements; it is unclear how bisexuality fits into this framework, but it can be assumed they have a dragging towards both gender roles as they do in sexuality, towards both sexes. However, this idea is based on generalizations of homosexual people, which tend to be biased, as feminine gays and masculine lesbians are more widely visible than masculine gays or feminine lesbians.
Same-sex domestic partners also challenge traditional gender roles because it is impossible to divide up household responsibilities along gender lines if both partners attempt to fill the same gender role. Like all live-in couples, same-sex partners usually do come to some arrangement with regard to household responsibilities. Sometimes these arrangements do assign traditional female responsibilities to one partner and traditional male responsibilities to the other, but non-traditional divisions of labor are also quite common. For instance, cleaning and cooking, traditionally both female responsibilities, might be assigned to different people. Some people do adopt the sexual role of bottom or top, due to their own sexual identity or for convenience; but this is not universal, and does not necessarily correspond to assignment of household responsibilities.
Cross-dressing is also quite common in gay and lesbian culture, but it is usually restricted to festive occasions, though there are people of all sexual orientations who routinely engage in various types of cross-dressing, either as a fashion statement or for entertainment. Distinctive styles of dress, however, are commonly seen in gay and lesbian circles. These fashions sometimes emulate the traditional styles of the opposite gender (For example, lesbians who wear t-shirts and boots instead of skirts and dresses, or gay men who wear clothing with traditionally feminine elements, including displays of jewelry or coloration), but others do not. Fashion choices also do not necessarily align with other elements of gender identity. Some fashion and behavioral elements in gay and lesbian culture are novel, and do not really correspond to any traditional gender roles. For example, the popularity of rainbow jewelry, or the gay techno/dance music subculture.
The term dyke, commonly used to mean lesbian, sometimes carries associations of a butch or masculine identity, and the variant bulldyke certainly does. Other gender-role-charged lesbian terms include lipstick lesbian, chapstick lesbian, and Stone Femme. "Butch," "femme," and novel elements are also seen in various lesbian subcultures.
Notes
- ↑ Connell, Robert William: Gender and Power, Cambridge: University Press 1987.
- ↑ Bruce Lipton Ph. D: Conscious Parenting, May 2006. Retrieved September 10, 2007.
- ↑ Bem,S.L.(1981). Gender schema theory:A cognitive account of sex typing. Psychological Review, 88, 354-364
- ↑ Brockhaus: Enzyklopädie der Psychologie, 2001.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale University Press (1993). ISBN 0300055838
- Brannon, Linda. Gender: Psychological Perspectives, Allyn & Bacon (2007). ISBN 0205521142
- Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge (2006). ISBN 0415389550
- Connell, R.W. Gender (Short Introductions), Polity Press (2002). ISBN 0745627161
- Disch, Estelle. Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology, McGraw Hill (2005). ISBN 0072997427
- Lindsey, Linda. Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective, Prentice Hall (2004). ISBN 0130104280
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