Marriages and Families: Changes, Choices, and Constraints Seventh Edition

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• Marriages and FamiliesChanges, Choices, and
  ConstraintsSeventh Edition
• Nijole V. Benokraitis
• Chapter Five
• Socialization and Gender Roles

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Gender Myths

• We tend to associate stereotypically female
  characteristics with weakness and typically male
  characteristics with strength.
• Hes firm, but shes stubborn.
• Hes careful about details, but shes picky.
• Hes honest, but shes opinionated.
• Hes raising good points, but shes bitchy.

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Why Do We Do This?

• We tend to see men as strong, not emotional and
  women as emotional and not strong, although we
  have seen those stereotypes change through the
  years and we are seeing them change even more.

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Is There a Difference Between Sex and Gender?

• Many people use these terms interchangeably, but
  they have distinct meanings.

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Is There a Difference Between Sex and Gender?
Sex refers to biological characteristics with
which we are born. Such characteristics
determine if we have male or female genitalia,
among other things. We refer to primary sex
characteristics as those physical characteristics
at birth such as testicles for boys or ovaries
for girls. Secondary sex characteristics are
those that develop during puberty.
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Is There a Difference Between Sex and Gender?

• Gender is more fluidit represents learned
  attitudes and behaviors that characterize people
  as men or women.
• Children develop gender identity as a perception
  of themselves as masculine or feminine.
• Regardless of sex, gender, and gender identity,
  both sexes experience emotions like anger or
  sadnessit is our gender identity that allows us
  to express that in a certain way.

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Gender Roles

• Gender roles are the characteristics, attitudes,
  feelings, and behaviors that society expects of
  males and females. The first place we learn
  about our gender roles is in our family. One of
  the very basic functions of the family is
  teaching us gender.

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Gender Roles

• Because gender roles are learned and not innate,
  they can be changed.
• However, we still live in a culture with
  widespread gender stereotypes about how men and
  women are supposed to behave.

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The Nature-Nurture Debate

• Those who argue that nature is most important
  point to three overall reasons
• Health DifferencesThere are several diseases
  that affect women and men differently and are
  more severe depending on whether you are male or
  female.

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The Nature-Nurture Debate
The Effects of Sex HormonesAll males and females
share three sex hormones. They are estrogen
(dominant in females), progesterone (present in
high levels during pregnancy in women), and
testosterone (dominate in males). After puberty,
varying levels of these hormones in males and
females produce different physiological changes.
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The Nature-Nurture Debate

• Unsuccessful Sex ReassignmentIn the famous case
  of the John and Joan twins, the famous
  psychologist John Money believed that one twin
  (who suffered accidental penis removal at a day
  old) could be raised as female and that she would
  never know that she had been born male.
• Money went on to publish numerous data about
  the case saying how wonderfully it was going,
  when in actuality the young woman (who was born
  male) was very troubled and eventually had sex
  reassignment back to male.

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How Important Is Nurture?

• Most social scientists maintain that culture, not
  nature, makes us who we are.
• There are varying examples across different
  cultures that would seem to make this argument.
  What is considered masculine in one culture may
  be considered feminine in another culture. If all
  human features were inborn, there wouldnt be
  this discrimination.

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Male Aggression and Violence

• If being male meant being aggressive and violent
  (as we sometimes think it does), then male
  violence should be basically the same
  cross-culturally. This is not the case. In
  countries that still tend to be very patriarchal,
  male violence towards women is very high (as much
  as 80 in Vietnam), whereas in cultures where
  women are more respected, male violence is less
  (only 13 in Japan).

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What Does the Nature-Nurture Debate Ultimately
Tell Us?

• 1. Women and men exhibit some sex-related
  genetic differences.
• 2. Cross-cultural research shows much variation
  in characteristics that are deemed male or
  female.
• 3. Nature and nurture interact to determine our
  behavior.

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Why Do Gender Roles Differ?

• There are many theories to explain for the
  differences in gender roles from culture to
  culture
• 1. Sociobiologyargues that evolution and
  genetic factors can explain why men are generally
  more aggressive than women. To propagate their
  genes, they must defeat their competition.
• 2. Social learning theorysays that people learn
  attitudes, beliefs and behaviors through social
  interactions. The learning is a result of
  reinforcement.

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Why Do Gender Roles Differ?

• 3. Cognitive development theoryArgues that
  children acquire female or male values on their
  own by thinking, reasoning, and interpreting
  information in their environment.
• 4. Symbolic interaction theorysays that gender
  roles are socially constructed categories that
  emerge in social situations.
• 5. Feminist theoristssay that gender is a
  socially constructed role that is taught
  carefully and repeatedlymuch like social
  learning theory.

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How Do We Learn Gender Roles?

• Parents are usually the first and by far the most
  influential socialization agents.
• Parents teach gender roles through
• Talkingparents often communicate differently
  with boys and girls.
• Setting expectationseven at times unknowingly,
  parents set different expectations for girls and
  for boys in things like sports, school, and
  household chores.

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How Do We Learn Gender Roles?

• Providing opportunitiesParents provide cultural
  opportunities based on what is accepted for boys
  and girls.
• Play and peer groupscan encourage
  gender-stereotypic behavior.

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Teachers and Schools

• Teachers and schools send a number of
  gender-related messages that follow boys and
  girls from grade school through college.
• Teachers in elementary, middle, and high schools
  have a huge influence on our children and some
  have very sex-stereotyped expectations.

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College

• Women earn about 58 of bachelors degrees and
  60 of masters degrees. Still, women focus more
  on traditional female kinds of roles like
  teaching, social work, and nursing.
• Some say women choose these fields because they
  like them, while others say they are not given
  the same early chances in math and science that
  boys are given, so they dont choose those fields.

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Popular Culture and the Media

• Media myths that every women should look like a
  supermodel assault our senses every day.
• Advertising is one important way that women are
  taught to look a certain way. It is not overt,
  but tends to be very covert.

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The Publishing Media

• Newspapers especially tend to be very
  male-dominated. A survey of 104 national
  magazines and local newspapers found that in
  3,500 frontpage stories, male sources outnumbered
  female sources almost three to one!
• For the most part, men still dominate written and
  television media.

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Instrumentaland Expressive Roles

• Instrumental roles tend to be occupied by men in
  our society. They must be the provider and
  protector of the family.
• Expressive roles in our society tend to be played
  by womenthey provide emotional support to the
  family, nurturing, etc.

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What Are the Costs and Benefits?

• Traditional roles have both benefits and
  costssee table 5.5 following.

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Why Do Traditional Roles Continue?

• For many families, traditional roles are
  beneficial for several reasons, especially when
  one partner can be the sole breadwinner and one
  partner can be the caregiver when it comes to the
  children.

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Gender Stratification

• Gender stratification refers to peoples unequal
  access to wealth, power, status, prestige,
  opportunity, and other valued resources because
  of their gender.

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The Second Shift

• In many cases, one of the major sources of
  tension between couples is that there is an
  unequal split of the second shiftthat time after
  work when housework, dinner, and child care takes
  place.

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Gender in the Workplace

• In the U.S. (as is true in most of the world),
  occupations are gendered. While we say that
  anyone can do any job, there still tend to be
  jobs that are womens jobs and jobs that are
  mens jobs. There is certainly greater
  equality in the U.S., but we still have a long
  way to go.

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Gender and Politics

• Again, as with workplace discrimination,
  discrimination in politics has come a long way.
• We still dont have a female president, but with
  Hillary Clinton being appointed as the Secretary
  of State, and some female governors now, we are
  starting to make progress.

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Gender and Politics
Worldwide, the U.S. far lags behind many other
nations in the world. Women in the U.S. are less
likely to receive encouragement to run for public
office. There is still a lingering sexism among
some men and women that men are better leaders.
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Gender and Education

• Our educational system seems to be gendered to
  some regard. When children enter kindergarten
  they score the same on similar tests, but by
  third grade the boys are scoring better on math
  and science. Is it because we expect them to do
  better in those areas so we push them?
• In higher education women earn the higher
  percentage of post-graduate degrees, but in
  typically male fields like engineering, a woman
  is much less likely than a man to be hired in
  higher education as an instructor in that course.

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Gender and Religion

• Religion shapes gender and family roles in many
  ways. Religion also shapes the division of labor
  in the home.
• At religious colleges and universities, some
  female faculty members believe that their
  expected gender roles are constraining. Often
  there are few female full-time faculty at such
  institutions.

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Gender and Interaction

• Women and men are more similar than different in
  their interactions.
• Research shows that womens interactions focus
  around relationship and relationship building,
  while mens communication tends to be more
  focused on conversational dominance, such as
  speaking more frequently and for longer periods
  of time.

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The GlobalGender Gap Index

• The GGGI tries to measure the well- being of
  women on a global scale. It gauges the relative
  equility between men and women on an indicator.

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Calculating the GDI involves three steps. Step 1
Unit-free indices between 0 and 1 are calculated
for females and males in each of the following
areas 1.life expectancy, 2.education (the adult
literacy rate and the combined primary to
tertiary gross enrollment ratio), 3.estimated
earned income (at purchasing power parity
US). Female Life Expectancy Index Male Life
Expectancy Index Female Male Education
Indices Female Male Income Indices Step
2 For each area, the pair of gender indices, are
combined into an Equally Distributed Index that
rewards gender equality and penalizes inequality.
It is calculated as the harmonic mean of the two
indices. Equally Distributed index Step 3
The GDI is the unweighted average of the three
Equally Distributed Indices Equally distributed
life expectancy index, Equally distributed
education index, Equally distributed income index
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Showing latest available data. Rank Countries
Amount 1 Norway 0.956 2
Sweden 0.943 3 Denmark 0.941 4
Finland 0.94 5 Netherlands 0.938 6
Canada 0.937 7 Germany 0.933 7
New Zealand 0.933 9 Australia 0.932
10 United States 0.927 11 Austria
0.926 12 Switzerland 0.925 13
Belgium 0.923 14 United Kingdom 0.921
15 Ireland 0.92 16 Italy 0.917
17 Japan 0.915 Weighted average 0.9

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• The past 25 years have seen the beginning of
  dramatic changes in some aspects of gender roles.
  More people say they believe in gender equality.
• Significant change in gender roles elicits
  constraints for both sexes at every level
  personal, group, and institutional.