Gender and Culture
Gender identity begins at birth and at five years of age, children can tell their gender.
Culture and society has an enormous impact on gender roles in America. Americans receive thousands of cultural messages each week concerning gender roles, including advertisements, movies, TV, music, magazines and family influence. People evaluate these messages to understand expectations for their gender and how they should operate within society.
While many people and organizations challenge these traditional gender roles, the influence of mainstream culture remains evident. Again we see the nature/nurture debate.
The biological theory of gender role development emphasizes the role of anatomy, hormones, and the make-up of the brain.
Those who follow this theory believe that regardless of what the parents do - boys will like trucks and girls will like dolls. Followers of this theory claim that differences in gender result from behaviors that men and women adopted throughout time in order to survive.
Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, believed that when a child identifies with the parent of the same sex, gender identity follows. Little boys will identify and therefore copy the behaviors of their father, while little girls identify and copy the behaviors of the mother.
Gender Roles
Earlier you learned about the social learning theory.
This theory combines social and cognitive processes on how we perceive, organize, and use information. In other words, children learn their gender roles by observing and imitating models such as their parents, teachers, friends, and peers. These models respond to and reward certain behaviors in boys and different behaviors in girls.
Gender differences in cognitive, social, and personal characteristics have been investigated since the early 1900s. However, the most striking finding in the study of gender is that in most areas the similarities between girls and boys far outweigh the differences.
Cognitive Skills and Gender Roles
In cognitive skills, the largest and most consistent gender differences are found in verbal, language, and certain spatial skills.
For example, girls tend to produce words earlier and have a larger vocabulary than boys until adolescence where the gap decreases.
Gender differences favoring boys appear at adolescence and increase during the high school years, but only in areas involving mathematics problem solving.
While it is important to understand how, when, and why gender differences exist, it is equally important to know when they do not exist so that neither girls nor boys are kept from developing their individual potentials.
Gender Roles
The roles of women and men in society are changing and have been changing since World War II when women joined the workforce in the place of men who had gone to war.
Despite the fact that more women are in the workforce, studies have shown that, in general, they do not advance as quickly as men and they occupy lower levels of leadership positions. This is changing but change is a slow process.
Companies may still discriminate against women. Women may interrupt their careers to be mothers and in doing so miss opportunities for advancement. Also, men and women may differ somewhat in their ambition. That is, women have been taught by society, or perhaps their parents, to set different goals.
Both within and across different cultures we find great consistency in standards of desirable gender-role behavior. Males are expected to be independent, assertive, and competitive; females are expected to be more passive, sensitive, and supportive.
These beliefs have changed little over the past twenty years within the United States and apparently around the world as well.
There is some variation in cultural gender-role standards both within the United States and across cultures, however.
Within the United States, standards vary depending on ethnicity, age, education, and occupation.
For example, African American families are less likely to adhere to strict gender-role distinctions when socializing their children, whereas Mexican-American families are more likely to highlight gender differences.
Read more about the changing role of women in Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures at PBS's Global Connections.
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