Psychology Facts

▲ Gender Roles ▲

Don't get offended by this (if for some reason you do. This is simply me reporting / informing on the subject. 

》 Sex roles, or gender roles, consist of the social expectations about the typical and appropriate behavior of men and women.

》 Developmental intergroup theory postulates that adults' heavy focus on gender leads children to pay attention to gender as a key source of information about themselves and others, to seek out any possible gender differences, and to form rigid stereotypes based on gender that are subsequently difficult to change.

》 Generally, the female gender role includes the expectation that women and girls exhibit communal traits and behaviors, which focus on interpersonal skill, expressivity, and emotional sensitivity.

》 In contrast, the male gender role includes the expectation that men and boys exhibit agentic traits and behaviors, which focus on self-orientation, independence, and assertiveness

》 There are four basic kinds of gender stereotypes:

Personality traits — For example, women are often expected to be accommodating and emotional, while men are usually expected to be self-confident and aggressive.

Domestic behaviors — For example, some people expect that women will take care of the children, cook, and clean the home, while men take care of finances, work on the car, and do the home repairs.

Occupations — Some people are quick to assume that teachers and nurses are women, and that pilots, doctors, and engineers are men.

Physical appearance — For example, women are expected to be thin and graceful, while men are expected to be tall and muscular. Men and women are also expected to dress and groom in ways that are stereotypical to their gender (men wearing pants and short hairstyles, women wearing dresses and make-up.

》 Hyperfemininity is the exaggeration of stereotyped behavior that's believed to be feminine. Hyperfeminine folks exaggerate the qualities they believe to be feminine. This may include being passive, naive, sexually inexperienced, soft, flirtatious, graceful, nurturing, and accepting.

》 Hyper-masculinity is the exaggeration of stereotyped behavior that's believed to be masculine. Hypermasculine folks exaggerate the qualities they believe to be masculine. They believe they're supposed to compete with other men and dominate feminine folks by being aggressive, worldly, sexually experienced, insensitive, physically imposing, ambitious, and demanding.

》 Societies organize on the basis of gender such that what is taken to be masculine and feminine influences and reflects a division of labor, the performance of which is evaluated and rewarded in a differential fashion.

》 In terms of language and language skills, girls develop language skills earlier and know more words than boys; this does not, however, translate into long-term differences.

》 Girls are also more likely than boys to offer praise, to agree with the person they're talking to, and to elaborate on the other person's comments; boys, in contrast, are more likely than girls to assert their opinion and offer criticisms (Leaper & Smith, 2004).

》 A second theory that attempts to explain the formation of gender roles in children is social learning theory. Social learning theory argues that gender roles are learned through reinforcement, punishment, and modeling. Children are rewarded and reinforced for behaving in concordance with gender roles and punished for breaking gender roles.

》 In terms of temperament, boys are slightly less able to suppress inappropriate responses and slightly more likely to blurt things out than girls (Else-Quest, Hyde, Goldsmith, & Van Hulle, 2006).

》 However, there is considerable variability between individual males and individual females. Also, even when there are mean level differences, the actual size of most of these differences is quite small.

》 This means, knowing someone's gender does not help much in predicting his or her actual traits. For example, in terms of activity level, boys are considered more active than girls. However, 42% of girls are more active than the average boy (but so are 50% of boys)

》 There are also psychological theories that partially explain how children form their own gender roles after they learn to differentiate based on gender.

》 The first of these theories is gender schema theory. Gender schema theory argues that children are active learners who essentially socialize themselves. In this case, children actively organize others' behavior, activities, and attributes into gender categories, which are known as schemas.

》People of all ages are more likely to remember schema-consistent behaviors and attributes than schema-inconsistent behaviors and attributes. So, people are more likely to remember men, and forget women, who are firefighters. They also misremember schema-inconsistent information