INTRODUCTION

In our society, there are norms of what is considered to be feminine and what is to be considered masculine, but how are these norms constructed? Through the use of toys, books, and clothing, children are socialized into their “appropriate” gender. These objects provide influence over behavior and appearance, showing boys and girls what is appropriate for each gender. It is found that the toys, books, and clothing that children use not only foster the norms of gender behavior and appearance, but also construct gender roles in their young minds. Toys play a major role in socializing young kinds into “appropriate” gender roles. The first obvious characteristic that separates toys for boys and toys for girls, is the use of colors. As customers walk into a toy store, they can easily spot the girl section. The girls aisle is the most pink you will ever see in a single area of a store. The aisle is filled with butterflies, unicorns, and dolls; everything any girl can imagine that would make her feel like a little princess. The boys aisle screams masculinity with the bold colors of blue and green, along with the macho action figures that carry little weapons. Studies of children’s book over the last 50 years have shown that girls are four times more likely to be shown using household objects (e.g. pots & pans) than boys, who are five times more likely to be shown using production objects (e.g. machinery) than girls. Such varying attitudes and behaviour towards males and females from their childhood start defining their gender roles.

SEX v/s GENDER

Sex refers to biological differences between males and females whereas Gender refers to the cultural expectations attached to feminine and masculine roles. The English-language distinction between the words sex and gender was first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by British and American psychiatrists and other medical personnel working with intersex and transsexual patients. Since then, the term gender has been increasingly used to distinguish between sex as biological and gender as socially and culturally constructed. Feminists have used this terminology to argue against the ‘biology is destiny’ line, and gender and development approaches have widely adopted this system of analysis. From this perspective, sex is fixed and based in nature; gender is fluid and based in culture. This distinction constitutes progress compared with ‘biology is destiny’.

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GENDER ROLE

A gender role is a set of behavioral norms associated particularly with males or females in a given social group or system, often including the division of labor between men and women and the attendant complex of child-rearing and socialization processes leading the youth towards maturing to perpetuate the same pattern. A person's gender role comprises several elements that can be expressed through clothing, behavior, occupation, personal relationships, and other factors. These elements are not fixed and have changed through time (for example, women's trousers). Gender roles traditionally were often divided into distinct feminine and masculine gender roles, until especially the twentieth century when these roles diversified into many different acceptable male or female roles in modernized countries throughout the world.

Gender roles therefore refers to the set of social and behavioral norms 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 and over time. There are differences of opinion 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 to what extent gender differences are due to biological and physiological differences

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.

In the majority of the traditional and developmental social systems, an individual has a choice as to what extent he or she becomes 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. Once someone has accepted certain gender roles and gender differences as expected socialized behavioral norms, these behavior traits become part of the individual's responsibilities.

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GENDER ROLE SOCIALISATION

Gender socialization starts at birth and it is a process of learning cultural roles according to one's sex. Right from the beginning, boys and girls are treated differently by the members of their own environment, and learn the differences between boys and girls, women and men. Parental and societal expectations from boys and girls, their selection of gender-specific toys, and/or giving gender based assignments seem to define a differentiating socialization process that can be termed as "gender socialization". There are numerous examples from varied parts of the world confirming that gender socialization is intertwined with the ethnic, cultural, and religious values of a given society. And gender socialization continues throughout the life cycle.

Gender socialization is the process by which people learn to behave in a certain way, as dictated by societal beliefs, values, attitudes and examples. Gender socialization begins as early as when a woman becomes pregnant and people start making judgments about the value of males over females. These stereotypes are perpetuated by family members, teachers and others by having different expectations for males and females.

SOCIETY AND GENDER ROLES: different expectations for males and females

The way we are, behave and think is the final product of socialisation. Since the moment we are born, we are being moulded into the being the society wants us to be. Through socialisation we also learn what is appropriate and improper for both genders.

As Freud observed, the first thing we instantly determine, when meeting someone new, is gender. Indeed, it will probably trouble us if we can't tell which gender the person is. Maybe this "need to know" has something to do with "knowing how to act" with this person.

According to psychologists such as Sandra Bem (1993), one cognitive process that seems nearly inevitable in humans is to divide people into groups. We can partition these groups on the basis of race, age, religion, and so forth. However, the major way in which we usually split humanity is on the basis of gender. This process of categorizing others in terms of gender is both habitual and automatic. It's nearly impossible to suppress the tendency to split the world in half, using gender as the great divider. When we divide the world into two groups, male and female, we tend to see all males as being similar, all females as being similar, and the two categories of "male" and "female" as being very different from each other. In real life, the characteristics of women and men tend to overlap. Unfortunately, however, gender polarization often creates an artificial gap between women and men.

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As mentioned above, the different ways of males and females interacting fit nicely with differences in men and women's value systems. Women value being sensitive and maintaining good relationships, i.e. attachment over achievement; men value gaining status by following "the rules," i.e. achievement over attachment. Since our society values competition and individuals being successful on their own, women's orientation towards caring for others and/or cooperatively building the community is considered (by the male dominated society) to be of lesser importance. These value differences are reflected in the gender roles established by our culture. Gender stereotypes are related to cognitive processes because we have different expectations for female and male behaviour.

Women are encouraged to be good mothers, they need therefore, to first attract a man to depend on; they are expected (by our culture) to be giving, emotional, unstable, weak, and talkative about their problems; they are valued for their looks or charm or smallness but not their strength or brains; they are considered unfeminine ("bad") if they are ambitious, demanding, and tough or rough; they are expected to follow "their man" and give their lives to "their children," and so on (Pogrebin, 1980).

Our culture continues to pressure to conform to these gender roles and do what women are "supposed to do"; the cultural, family, and friends' expectations become internalised as our own self-expectations; guilt may result if we don't follow the prescribed roles. Gender roles therefore limit what both males and females can do.

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, and the majority of Russian doctors are women.

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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", “female barber”, "male secretary," and so forth. 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 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 "typists" 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 beyond ordinary conscious awareness

RELIGION AND GENDER ROLES

Parenting o Religion shapes gender roles and family roles in many ways. Example: the Ten

Commandments.

Domestic Roleso Religion shapes the division of labor in the home. In evangelical households,

wives spend more time on traditional women’s work.

Role modelso Religion influences role models. For example, many Christian colleges remind

female students to not work outside the home, though this is in conflict with their female professors working.

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GENDER ROLE THEORY

Gender role theory posits that boys and girls learn the appropriate behavior and attitudes from the family and overall culture they grow up with, and so non-physical gender differences are a product of socialization.

Social role theory proposes that the social structure is the underlying force for the gender differences. Social role theory proposes that the sex-differentiated behavior is driven by the division of labor between two sexes within a society. Division of labor creates gender roles, which in turn, lead to gendered social behavior.

The physical specialization of the sexes is considered to be the distal cause of the gender roles. Men’s unique physical advantages in term of body size and upper body strength provided them an edge over women in those social activities that demanded such physical attributes such as hunting, herding and warfare. On the other hand, women’s biological capacity for reproduction and child-bearing is proposed to explain their limited involvement in other social activities. Such divided activity arrangement for the purpose of achieving activity-efficiency led to the division of labor between sexes. Social role theorists have explicitly stressed that the labor division is not narrowly defined as that between paid employment and domestic activities, rather, is conceptualized to include all activities performed within a society that are necessary for its existence and sustainability. The characteristics of the activities performed by men and women became people's perceptions and beliefs of the dispositional attributes of men or women themselves. Through the process of correspondent inference, division of labor led to gender roles, or gender stereotype. Ultimately, people expect men and women who occupy certain position to behave according to these attributes.

These socially constructed gender roles are considered to be hierarchical and characterized as a male-advantaged gender hierarchy. The activities men involved in were often those that provided them with more access to or control of resources and decision making power, rendering men not only superior dispositional attributes via correspondence bias, but also higher status and authority as society progressed. The particular pattern of the labor division within a certain society is a dynamic process and determined by its specific economical and cultural characteristics. For instance, in an industrial economy, the emphasis on physical strength in social activities becomes less compared with that in a less advanced economy. In a low birth rate society, women will be less confined to reproductive activities and thus more likely to be involved in a wide range of social activities. The beliefs that people hold about the sexes are derived from observations of the role performances of men and women and thus reflect the sexual division of labor and gender hierarchy of the society.

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The consequences of gender roles and stereotypes are sex-typed social behavior because roles and stereotypes are both socially shared descriptive norms and prescriptive norms. Gender roles provide guides to normative behaviors that are typical, ought-to-be and thus “likely effective” for each sex within certain social context. Gender roles also depict ideal, should-be, and thus desirable behaviors for men and women who are occupying a particular position or involving in certain social activities. Put is another way, men and women, as social beings, strive to belong and seek for approval by complying and conforming to the social and cultural norms within their society. The conformity to social norms not only shapes the pattern, but also maintains the very existence of sex-typed social behavior.

In summary, social role theory “treats these differing distributions of women and men into roles as the primary origin of sex-differentiated social behavior, their impact on behavior is mediated by psychological and social processes”, including “developmental and socialization processes, as well as by processes involved in social interaction (e.g., expectancy confirmation) and self-regulation” (Eagly et al., 2004).

GENDER ROLES AND GENDER STEREOTYPES

Often we tend to use indifferently those two terms even if there is a great difference between them, particularly in relation to the concept of gender. In fact stereotypes are representative of a society’s collective knowledge of customs, myths, ideas, religions, and sciences. It is within this knowledge that an individual develops a stereotype or a belief about a certain group. Social psychologists feel that the stereotype is one part of an individual’s social knowledge. As a result of their knowledge, or lack of knowledge, the stereotype has an effect on their social behaviour.

Stereotypic behaviour can be linked to the way that the stereotype is learned, transmitted, and changed and this is part of the socialization process as well. The culture of an individual influences stereotypes through information that is received from indirect sources such as, parents, peers, teachers, political and religious leaders, and the mass media.

Stereotyping occurs all the time in society. People stereotype others for many different reasons. Individuals get stereotyped because of their gender. If you are a male, you are to be strong and the breadwinner of the family. Women are to take care of the children and to clean the house. By nature, men and women have some biological differences, but it is life experience that reinforces or contradicts those differences. The truth lies in differential socialization, which claims that males and females are taught different appropriate behaviours for their gender. This begins at such an early age that children fully understand how to act according to their gender by age five or six.

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THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO GENDER ROLE SOCIALIZATION

Reinforcement Theory simply means rewarding the desired actions and punishing the

undesired ones, this works the same way as operant conditioning. Therefore the traits

that the socialisers want to be emphasised in the future are being reinforced. This

theory however does not take into account that not everything has to be learned by

ourselves anymore, we have other people showing us what to do.

Cognitive Development Theory also depends on observational learning, but it states

that children do not imitate everything blindly; they use intellectual operations to

choose the useful information and leave out the meaningless.

According to the Consensus Theory, in a family, men tend to perform the instrumental

tasks (a concern with achieving a task or goal) and women perform expressive tasks

(concerned with affection and emotion). The consensus view is that these gender roles

are natural, inevitable and functional.

Social Learning Theory on the other hand emphasizes observational learning. Children

observe other persons and imitate them, and therefore learn something new. Gender

roles are belief systems that guide the way we process information, including

information about gender. Children learn behaviour which is considered appropriate for

their sex through observations of others, such as a same sex parent; as well as, through

messages communicated by the media.

After all this is said about the way we are brought up, there is still the question about

biological differences. Often gender roles are defended by biological differences of

sexes, and it is true that differences exist. It is true that males are from birth more

physically active and irritable than females. This difference is also seen in other

primates. Also in every culture males commit more violent acts than females. This

evidence would verify that boys are predisposed toward physical aggression, which is

even enhanced by the male sex hormones. But however socialisation would seem to

magnify this predisposition as boys are given toy swords and guns, while the aggression

in girls is discouraged and they are given cooking sets and dolls as toys.

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GENDER SOCIALISATION PROCESS

Oakley (1981) argues that Gender Socialisation had four central elements:

Manipulation - Parents encourage or discourage ways of behaving in their children on the basis of what they considered to be normal or abnormal behaviour for a male or female child.

Canalization - Parents direct their children’s interests towards appropriate games and toys for their gender. Drawing upon his own experience, Stephen Pfohl (1992) talks about how he asked his parents if he could have a baby brother or sister, when they refused he asked if he could have a doll instead. Reluctantly, his parents agreed. Whilst in his bedroom with the window open, Stephen heard his parents discussing the doll and their concerns about it. On hearing this, Stephen went downstairs and asked his parents to take the doll back to the shop and exchange it for a gun. His parents were pleased.

Verbal appellations – this is the use of language to label children in a way that reinforces appropriate gender identification. Think of the pet names applied to children according to gender.

Different activities - Girls are encouraged to participate in indoor activities which are often ‘domestic’ in nature. Boys are encouraged to participate in more outdoor activities.

Language provides a basic mechanism by which individuals are categorized into groups, and by which stereotypes are shared with others. (A shared stereotype is simply the same stereotype that is held by more than one person). Language also consists of processes, which involve naming, labelling, and categorizing. The role of language, in reference to stereotypes, leads to a direct focus on the content of the category labels and the stereotype. It is these labels and the context that they are used in that determine the reaction an individual may have to a person fitting the category. Their social behaviour may be negative or positive depending on how they interpret the given label.

In summary, it is through this gendered socialisation process that we develop our personality, our sense of self and our identity as female or male.

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SOME EXAMPLES FROM STUDIES CONDUCTED ON GENDER SOCIALISATION

The classical example of Gender Socialisation is the experiment done with a baby that

was introduced as a male to half of the study subjects and as a female to the other half.

The results are interesting and quite disturbing at the same time. When the participants

thought they were playing with a baby boy, "he" was offered toys, such as a hammer or

rattle, while if the participants thought they were playing with a baby girl, "she" was

offered a doll. The participants also touched the baby differently. It was found that baby

boys are often bounced, thus stimulating the whole body, whereas girls are touched

more gently and less vigorously (Gleitman, Friedlund & Reisberg,2000).

In another study it was found out that words such as "sturdy", "handsome" and "tough"

are used to describe boy infants and "dainty", "sweet" and "charming" for girl infants,

although there was no difference in the sizes of the infants (Giddens, 1993).

These findings show that other people contribute a lot as we see ourselves only on the basis of

gender. In the first case presented, the message that the participants were sending was that if

the baby is a boy, he must play with hammers and such only because of his gender, while on

the other hand girls have to play with dolls because they are girls. In the second case we can

see that boys are socialised to be tough, while girls are supposed to be sweet and charming.

The traditional gender roles help to sustain gender stereotypes, such as that males are

supposed to be adventurous, assertive aggressive, independent and task-oriented, whereas

females are seen as more sensitive, gentle, dependent, emotional and people-oriented. In the

same way, males are expected to major in sciences or economics in college, while women

should study arts, languages and humanities.

Finally, in the work force these stereotypes persist, more men become doctors, construction

workers, mechanics, pilots, bankers and engineers and more women become secretaries,

teachers, nurses, flight attendants, bank tellers and housewives. This can be seen from the

statistics, how some labour force areas still are male and female oriented.

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AGENCIES OF SOCIALISATION

Family

Gender identity stems from:

o Imitation of parental role models

o Parents rewarding gender-appropriate behaviour (manipulation)

o Parents discouraging gender-inappropriate behaviour

o Parents adopting different modes of speech and terms of endearment depending on the gender of the child

o Mothers’ preoccupation with female children’s appearance

o Parents giving children gender-specific toys, books and games (canalisation)

o Children being dressed in gender-specific clothes and colours

o Parents assigning gender-specific household chores to children

o Parents socially controlling the behaviour of girls more tightly than boys.

Education

o Schools engage in substantial gender ideology formation and transmission through classroom practices, teachers’ attitudes and expectations, and the intense but rather invisible work of peers.

o Much of the gender construction in schools creates very distinct notions of what it means to be a man and a woman, with polarized attributes for femininity and masculinity. This construction is similar across levels of education and intensifies as the time in school expands.

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o Across most countries, boys continue to dominate classroom time and space, a practice that seems to create subdued girls and naturalizes differences between men and women.

o Academic performance of boys and girls is moving toward convergence, but notions still remain about fields of study and occupations that result in their clustering by gender.

o The curriculum, especially sex education, continues to center on biological features and refuses to acknowledge social dimensions of adolescent sexuality and treats sex as an issue to be controlled by others.

o While many teachers are women, their own lack of professional training on gender issues does not build on their potential as role models for transformative work or as advocates for gender social justice.

o Most public education policies fail to recognize the socialization role of schools and to address detrimental effects through intensive counter measures. Overall, little progress can be detected in the past decade in terms of transformations in policy and practice from a gender perspective.

The Peer Group

o The interaction among peers constitutes a major determinant in the gender socialization process in schools. Peers contribute powerfully to the climate of classrooms and to the re-enactment of conventional sexual norms.

o In the peer culture, boys feel pressured to be less academically oriented.

o Student constructions of their identities take place not only in relation to teachers and the official curriculum but also in conversations with classmates, activities in the playground and through their engagement in related extracurricular activities.

o Peer interactions can reinforce or contradict messages about gender emanating from the school curriculum.

o Often, peer networks are more supportive of traditional gender arrangements than are school personnel.

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The Mass Media

o Feminists are critical of a range of mass media that socialize females into either domestic or sexualised patterns of femininity.

o Popular literature, especially fairy tales and children’s stories, portray females as the weaker sex and males as heroes.

o Children’s books portray traditional gender roles.

o Magazines for teenage adolescents encourage them to concentrate on appearance and romance rather than on education and careers.

o Women’s magazines are apprentice manuals for motherhood and domesticity.

o Adverts continue to show women disproportionately in domestic roles and emphasize their physical looks and sex appeal at the expense of ability and personality.

o Magazines and pornography assert a very traditional view of masculinity organized around interpreting women as sexual objects, sport and drinking culture.

GENDER ROLES AND FEMINISM

Most feminists have argued 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 occupations 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.

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What characteristics of male and female gender roles can lead to ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender equity’ globally?

There is a universal pattern of gender role expectations that can be elaborated, adopted and accepted by every society. This can help girls and women participate as equal citizens, and can reduce violence against girls and women as well as boys and men. But the challenge is to define positive male and female gender roles that will replace those that are now ‘not working’ in our society.

Among the contributors to the discussion, Malaak Zalouk described the challenge: “It is not only that we affix specific gender roles from birth and that we expect each of the gender roles to present discrete and pure models; we also create a hierarchy of masculine and feminine traits regardless of who they are attributed to. In other words, being tough (a masculine trait) is usually ranked as a more elevated trait than being considerate in the global value system of today …whereas being loving, sensitive or considerate is viewed as weak, and of course more so for men. The same is true of the dichotomy between being rational and intuitive. The assumption seems always to be that these are mutually exclusive traits.” Zalouk concluded that research indicates that the most creative human beings are able to combine femininity and masculinity in equal measure.

Jennifer Strauss commented: “We need to emphasize the common (across gender) activities and interests of children as well as honouring their differences – if we do so we may be able to reduce levels of gender hostility later in life.”

CONCLUSION

The shifting of gender roles in the past 30 years has been huge. It has happened so quickly that men and women are still trying to sort out what the new roles and rules mean to them. Although women are no longer expected to be the keepers of the house, in reality, they are in most families. Although men are generally open to the successes enjoyed by the women they share their lives with, some still find it hard to celebrate a woman's triumphs because they feel it diminishes their own.

However, rather than blaming each other for the situation, men and women are increasingly willing to work together to learn about their new roles. Successful marriage partners learn to negotiate and share tasks. Managers take employees aside and tell them when comments are inappropriate. It will take time to sort out all the implications of the changing gender roles, but new expectations should result in better workplaces, better relationships, better schools, and better lives.

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