Discuss The Role Played By Social Influences On Ge

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Discuss the role played by social influences on gender Gender is a persons sexual identity within the society or culture they are part of. It’s the way they feel about themselves as a male or female and often described using the terms masculine and feminine. Social Influence can be understood as the influence that society (social groups, friends, family, and others) exerts either deliberately or unintentionally, and which brings about changes in someone’s behaviour. Gender roles are influenced greatly by parents, who have strong views about how their children should act, so they develop differential reinforcements for boys and girls. Learning through reinforcement is known as operant conditioning. From when we are only infants our parents are raising us to be the gender that our sex assumes us to be. For example, little boys are dressed in light blue and given toy cars and guns to play with. Young girls, however are raised in pink, wearing skirts and dresses and playing with Barbie dolls and cooking sets. Lytton and Romney (1991) carried out a meta-analysis of 175 studies looking at parental treatment of boys and girls in North America and Western countries. They found that there was no difference in the amount of interaction or communication that girls and boys received from their parents, but they were encouraged to take part in sex-typed activities. For example, girls were encouraged to help with indoor household chores, while boys were encouraged to do more outdoor tasks. These same patterns are found in other Western countries such as the UK and France, but boys were more likely to be physically punished than girls in these countries. It was found that fathers had a tendency to differentiate more than mothers between girls and boys, which is supported by Siegal (1987), who found that fathers were more likely to react negatively to boys playing with girls’
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