Just the Way We Are Everyone thought that there are similar differences between males and females. Both genders are different through their social, emotional and intellectual qualities. Gender roles influence women and men in virtually every area of life including family and occupation, but are women and men subject to different roles or behavior expectations? Gender role by definition is,” the public image of being male or female that a person presents to others.” (Dictionary.com). In early American culture it was common for a women’s job to be an obedient housewife in clear contrast to the male’s duty to be a job holder.
The values, norms, and behaviors surrounding marriage (such as age limits, ‘showers’, and marriage licenses), and the ways in which these aspects of the function benefit the participants, is the ‘society’ which rises from the initial structure. In a functional view social functions are seen to exist as they do because they are necessary and stabilizing influences. If the function existed otherwise (unnecessary and/or destabilizing) it would cease naturally or be changed by the participants. These natural conclusions of functionalism invited stern criticism during the mid-1900’s, when social upheaval was present in many parts of the world. Functional theory seemed to support the idea of a ‘status quo’, or an assumption that social functions are either fine as they are or are evolving toward something better.
That is, gender is widely perceived as simply being a natural occurrence that happens at birth. Yet, studying gender as a social-economic driver rather than just a natural phenomenon, allows us to understand that there is more to gender than simply human nature. In reality gender is continually been re-created through” human interactions, and is the texture and order of social life”. In other words, we identify the differences between male and a female based on the behavior each one of these respective statuses constitutes in our social life. Personally, I define gender as a human production that depends on everyone constantly “doing” gender.
The mother will provide emotional support such as comforting her children when they are upset, playing, talking and interacting with them, taking them to school and cooking and cleaning up after them. Emotional support is also given to the male, whom play the instrumental role. The mother will give her partner emotional support after he has come home after a day’s work; this is because he is the breadwinner of the family and provides the main financial income. Her partner may be stressed or worried about work, by talking to each other about this he will get some emotional support and
Examine the factors affecting the domestic division of labour and power relations. (24) Domestic labour consists mainly of childcare, housework and emotional maintenance for the family. Parsons, 1995, drew the conclusion that men and women have different roles within the family, with men expected to be the bread earners, and go out too work, whereas women, in most cases, had to stay at home and perform the various domestic labour tasks required of them. This included all the above mentioned tasks, and parsons stated that this was the "expressive" role, and that this system made things "nice and functional", stating that the respective genders were uniquely suited biologically for these roles. Power relations within a household refer to the control of decisions, finance and the families direction, and whom they are controlled by.
For some couples, there may even be a "role reversal," with men largely assuming the female style and women the male style. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Throughout the world, gender-differentiated parenting occurs naturally in most father-mother families. And certainly, let us not forget,
The biosocial theory. The term ‘culture’ encompasses the knowledge, beliefs and values shared by a society that are passed down the generations through imitation and communication. By looking at research through a variation of different cultures we can distinguish between universal features, which suggest an innate basis for gender therefore supporting the nurture side of the argument, and culturally specific features, which suggest gender is learned and so support the nurture side of the argument. A famous piece of cross cultural research on gender was the Six Cultures Study by Whiting and Whiting (1975) studied child rearing processes in North America, the Philippines, India, Mexico, Kenya and Japan. Researchers integrated themselves into the societies and conducted systematic 5 minute observations of the children’s daily lives.
Gender Roles roots A gender role is a theoretical construct in the social sciences and humanities that refers to a set of social and behavioral norms that, within a specific culture, are widely considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific gender. They may reflect natural gender aspirations of the members of that gender identity, or they may be politicized and manipulated, which then result in the oppression of people. By this definition we can find clear boundaries for gender roles in each culture. In my native culture there are some clear gender roles, although some of them are changing. These gender roles can be categorized in different field.
Gender roles refer to the set of social and behavioral rules that are considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex in the context of a specific culture, which differ widely between cultures. There are different opinions as to whether observed gender differences in behavior and personality characteristics are, at least in part, due to cultural or social factors, and therefore, the product of socialization experiences, or they are due to biological and physiological differences. Views on gender-based differentiation in the workplace and in interpersonal relationships have often undergone profound changes as a result of feminist and/or economic influences, but there are still considerable differences in gender roles in almost all societies. It is also true that in times of necessity, such as during a war or other emergency, women are permitted to perform functions which in "normal" times would be considered a male role, or vice versa. Gender is used to describe those
One study indicates that parents have differential expectations of sons and daughters as early as 24 hours after birth (Rubin, Provenzano, & Luria, 1974). Also household jobs assigned to the child respective of their sex, are likely to differ. For example, girls are more likely to have chores such as cooking and doing the laundry, while boys are more likely to have chores such as cutting the grass or fetching blocks and coal for the fire. (Basow, 1992) This creates children to link certain types of work with certain genders. From the very beginning boys and girls are treated very differently by members of their own environment e.g.