Gender role
A gender role, or sex role, is a social norm deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex, and is usually centered on societal views of masculinity and femininity.
The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may vary among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures. In addition, gender roles vary based on a person's race or ethnicity.
Gender roles influence a wide range of human behavior, often including the clothing a person chooses to wear, the profession a person pursues, manner of approach to things, the personal relationships a person enters, and how they behave within those relationships. Although gender roles have evolved and expanded, they traditionally keep women in the "private" sphere, and men in the "public" sphere.
Various groups, most notably feminist movements, have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive, inaccurate, and sexist.
Background
A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles can be linked with essentialism, the idea that humans have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity based on their gender. Sociologists tend to use the term "gender role" instead of "sex role", because the sociocultural understanding of gender is distinguished from biological conceptions of sex. There are multiple theories that explain how gender roles can affect different aspects of everyday life.In the sociology of gender, the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed gender socialization.
Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two, others recognize more. Some non-Western societies have three genders: men, women, and a third gender. Buginese society has identified five genders. Androgyny has sometimes also been proposed as a third gender. An androgyne or androgynous person is someone with qualities pertaining to both the male and female gender. Some individuals identify with no gender at all.
Many transgender people identify simply as men or women, and do not constitute a separate third gender. Biological differences between trans women and cisgender women have historically been treated as relevant in certain contexts, especially those where biological traits may yield an unfair advantage, such as sport.
Gender role is not the same thing as gender identity, which refers to the internal sense of one's own gender, whether or not it aligns with categories offered by societal norms. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role.
Theories
can be explained by various theories, see possible causes. According to the theory of social constructionism, gendered behavior is mostly due to the social construction of gender. Other theories such as evolutionary psychology disagree with that position.Most children learn to categorize themselves by gender by the age of three. From birth, in the course of gender socialization, children learn gender stereotypes and roles from their parents and environment. Traditionally, boys learn to manipulate their physical and social environment through physical strength or dexterity, while girls learn to present themselves as objects to be viewed. Social constructionists argue that differences between male and female behavior are better attributable to gender-segregated children's activities than to any essential, natural, physiological, or genetic predisposition.
A 2024 study researched the social construction of gender. The author, V.J. Daniels discussed the relationship between the gender pay gap and social construction. She looked that the gendered language in different statutes and cognitive dissonance. The author looked at whether or not there was gendered language in literature and laws that governed equal pay. The second part of her research question was to see if the gendered language in these laws, acts, and literature affected how individuals' experiences. The author found that in the Equal Pay Act of 1963, gendered language was strongly feminine, while in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Paycheck Fairness Act gendered language was strongly masculine. In total, there were more masculine words than feminine, The results of the interview part of the study indicated the male who was interviewed had a high Bem score, meaning he expected his needs to be listened to in his home life and the workplace. The women who were interviewed had a low score, meaning they did not expect their needs to be listened to in their home life and workplace.
As an aspect of role theory, gender 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." According to Gilbert Herdt, gender roles arose from correspondent inference, meaning that general labor division was extended to gender roles.
Social constructionists consider gender roles to be hierarchical and patriarchal. The term patriarchy, according to researcher Andrew Cherlin, defines "a social order based on the domination of women by men, especially in agricultural societies".
According to Eagly et al., 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.
Conflicts between aspects of gender roles result in gender role conflicts.
Major theorists
Talcott Parsons
Working in the United States in 1955, Talcott Parsons developed a model of the nuclear family, which at that place and time was the prevalent family structure. The model compared a traditional contemporaneous view of gender roles with a more liberal view. The Parsons model was used to contrast and illustrate extreme positions on gender roles, i.e., gender roles described in the sense of Max Weber's ideal types rather than how they appear in reality. Model A described a total separation of male and female roles, while Model B described the complete dissolution of gender roles.| Model A – Total role segregation | Model B – Total integration of roles | |
| Education | Gender-specific education; high professional qualification is important only for the man. | Co-educative schools, same content of classes for girls and boys, same qualification for men and women. |
| Profession | The workplace is not the primary area of women; career and professional advancement is deemed unimportant for women. | For women, career is just as important as for men; equal professional opportunities for men and women are necessary. |
| Housework | Housekeeping and child care are the primary functions of the woman; participation of the man in these functions is only partially wanted. | All housework is done by both parties to the marriage in equal shares. |
| Decision making | In case of conflict, man has the last say, for example in choosing the place to live, choice of school for children, and buying decisions. | Neither partner dominates; solutions do not always follow the principle of finding a concerted decision; status quo is maintained if disagreement occurs. |
| Child care and education | Woman takes care of the largest part of these functions; she educates children and cares for them in every way. | Man and woman share these functions equally. |
The model is consciously a simplification; individuals' actual behavior usually lies somewhere between these poles. According to the interactionist approach, gender roles are not fixed but are constantly renegotiated between individuals.
John Money
"In the 1950s, John Money and his colleagues took up the study of intersex individuals, who, Money realized, 'would provide invaluable material for the comparative study for bodily form and physiology, rearing, and psychosexual orientation'." Money coined the term gender role, which he defined in a seminal 1955 paper as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."The team concluded that gonads, hormones, and chromosomes did not automatically determine a child's gender role.