Gender Roles of Men and Women

In many shops, there seems to be an obvious separation between boys and girls items, for example, the birthday cards, books, clothes, and toys. This is shown in a variety of ways the boy's items are mainly the color blue and the books have pictures of either action figures, superheroes or tools. Whereas the girl's items are mainly the color pink. The books show pictures of fairies, princess, and Bratz. The cards also have the theme of the color pink for girls and blue for boys. The girl's cards have a lot of sparkles and pretty pictures whereas the boy's cards are covered in camo kind of illustrations and also have action figures on the covers. The children's clothes are separated into sections where there are labels for the boy's clothes and labels for the girl's clothes. The girl's clothing is all pretty and pink, it is covered in sparkles. Whereas boys clothing has camo patterns, blue colors, and pictures of action figures.

In present day all around the world, society has certain expectations for the actions and behaviors of males and females. There are many factors in our everyday lives that contribute to the gender norms that society has set. This essay will discuss how situations in life can play a part in how people treat other people based on their gender. It is believed that males are the leaders of our world, but in present day woman can do as much as men can do. From The Journal of Marriage and Family, Hu states, “Differentiated gender roles in adulthood are rooted in one’s gender role socialization. In order to understand the persistence of gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, we need to examine the gendered patterns of children’s housework time.”(2015, P.1). Gender roles are society’s expectations of the proper behavior, attitudes, and activities of males and females that they must be taught. These roles define how females and males are viewed in society, their household, and workplace. In The Journal of Sports behavior by Hardin, he states, “Although gender role differences from biological and “Natural” exists in popular consciousness, research has long demonstrated that instead, many are long time socially constructed… Individuals understand their gender because they are given names and treated in particular ways, such as dress in pink for girls and blue for boys, that reflect social construction of gender. Bandura's social cognitive theory is key in understanding the factors in socialization”(2009, P.3). Bandura's theory of of social cognition is that behavior, environmental events, and cognitive factors are the main keys that shape attitudes and actions of an individual. Although, gender roles play a very big part in our society, specific genders are treated differently while dealing with peer influence, media influence, as well as employment.

Who is supposed to take out the trash? The man or the woman? Gender roles have become norms within heterosexual relationships in our society. Beyond simple tasks being associated with gender—women washing dishes and men taking out the trash—power has also become tied to gender. Men have acquired an unbalanced hold of power that women have been denied. Ciara points out these unfair gender roles in her music video Like a Boy. To Ciara, men have been allowed to lie, cheat, be secretive, and come home late—giving men an unequal hold of power within the relationship. She refers to these actions as acting “like a boy.” In order to reveal the unfairness of these double standard gender roles, Ciara asks what would be if she, more broadly what would happen if women did these things; what if they acted “like a boy?” The video begins with shots of Ciara after switching roles and says: “2007 ladies, I think it’s time to switch roles.” She makes a call to women to switch roles, to critique the actions that have been deemed acceptable for men, but unacceptable for women.

For centuries now, women have been bombarded with an infinite amount of conflicting and overwhelming messages about what it means to be a woman and which behaviors are considered appropriate, especially regarding sexual behavior. Traditionally, women have always been defined in relation to men. Men are seen as strong, while woman are seen as weak. Men are superior and women are their subordinates. This is exemplified by the fact that “masculine” traits such as strong, non-emotional, and competitive are considered socially desirable traits, while “feminine” traits such as docile, emotional, and passive are not. We evidently live in a society that is not only sexist, but also undoubtedly racist. The white woman typically appears as virtuous and pure, while the woman of color typically appears as unclean and tainted. If the woman of color also happens to be poor, she appears as being even more worthless. Therefore, in the United States, femininity as a concept is inextricably linked with concepts of race and class. In the present paper, I discuss the effect that this is having on women and their sexuality, the events that have paved the traveled path towards gender equality, and current issues plaguing women today, such as the attack on our reproductive rights and our value as women.

Literature throughout history has displayed to us the evolution of the male and female gender roles in society. Women have been described as ‘the angel in the house,’ whilst men are typified as dominant and prevailing in comparison to women. The gothic genre in literature is used to personify and exaggerate these stereotypes, by using gothic motifs such as dream sequences and themes such as horror and terror. Not only does the gothic exaggerate the stereotypes, but it also allows them to be contravened, due to the transgressive nature of the genre. The psychoanalytical aspect of this genre, allows for repressed desires to be made eminent and therefore characters can transgress and in the process, cross their contemporary gender boundaries. Keats uses the gothic device of Negative capability in order to conceal the transgression of the females in his poetry, Carter revised gothic fairytales in order to display them from a feminist approach and Stoker uses gothic themes, set against the backdrop of the fluidity of Fin de siècle period, to allow characters to stray from their gender stereotypes.

When I was a little girl, my neighbors and I would always be outside until our parents called us in for dinner. We would be playing football, riding our bikes, playing gas station and other games you played when you were little. Even when I was younger we were all in a stereotype of what we could and not do because of the gender roles placed on each one of us. Society has told us that we need to play with the toys that they label as appropriate for your gender. That is why we see even at younger ages the commercials on the television socializes you into what a girl should play with and what a guy should play with which puts us in the gender roles that we have in society. The boy toys were the action figures, blue colored, and more violent. While the girl toys were pink, sparkly, and mostly dolls. When I was younger sometimes I wasn’t able to hang out with the boys at recess for they would say it’s a boy sport and you are a girl. Looking back now, I realize that these boys at such a young age was putting me into a category of being weak and more sensitive. We see this every day, girls being labeled as a group of being more nurturing and sensitive and boys being more masculine. This can be contributed to the fact that as we were younger we grew up with specific gendered toys that could have impacted our life into how we label each other even today.

To understand gender differences within language and society, we must first realize how our genders were divided. The division between the sexes began with the agricultural revolution that transformed human civilization that is believed to have taken place between 8000 and 7000 B.C.E. The consequences of agriculture and the ability to harvest and store food, eliminating the need to hunt and gather, were life changing. Settlements began to develop and gender roles were forming. Men would tend to the fields and the herds while women had a tendency to remain close to the homes, becoming the caretakers of the children and households. As civilization developed, the work done by the men away from the home grew to be regarded as more important than the work done by the women. Due to this newly found perception, “men came to play the more dominant role in human society, which gave rise to the patriarchy” (Spielvogel 4-5). This mindset has been fortified in human culture and has defined gender roles in societies throughout the centuries.

Since the last few decades, there has been a trend of shift in roles and expectations of men and

Fairy tales have been around for generations. They are a way to express the idealistic realities of society. In most fairy tales, the roles of men and women reflect the way men and women are portrayed in reality. Many cultures believe that women are to be seen and not heard and that the only necessity for them is to take care of the house and raise children to repopulate society. Fairy tales originated from oral tradition. These stories were passed down and here eventually written down. As known as a result of oral tradition the stories were changed to fit the audience and make storytelling more interesting. According to MPhil Kings, there are several broad classifications of types of fairy tales. There are animal tales, ordinary folktales, jokes and anecdotes, formula Tales and Unclassified Tales. For the most part, I will be looking at Ordinary Folktales.

Everyday you hear women and men being compared in life. A majority of the time it is in a form of men being more superior than women rather it 's stereotypes, appearances, or money; Men usually end up more dominant. Society tends to assume that men are more capable than women in all aspects throughout life. These postulations have commenced before we were even born. Men are expected to constantly be working and providing the home for the women and children; Women are assumed to be cleaning, cooking and taking care of the children in the house. There multitudinous assumptions made towards men and women affect the way we live. Expectations like these are why patriarchal societies are composed. Patriarchal society means that men over rule the women in many ways and are more dominant causing a contrasting way of life. It has become more instinctive for humans to think this particular way because they are being circumvented by these assumptions everyday. Throughout literature, it is clear that men and women make gender role assumptions during all different time frames forming patriarchal societies. From the novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, and Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire the male characters show how they specifically formed a patriarchal society with how dominant they are to the women characters in the novels due to the assumptions that men and women make about gender roles.

Broadly conceptualized, gender roles are what our society expects and values in their community. They shape our behavior and values, thoughts and feelings, even going so far as to denote a person’s worth. Gender roles are present in everyday situations. In the past they strictly dictated the behavior of people in the community (the right to vote, occupations women were allowed to work in), though in the recent past have become more subtle and more successfully challenged. In some instances they are learned consciously, in others they are more subtly ingrained in our lives. Put simply, they are ubiquitous not only in intimate partner violence, but in almost every part of our lives.

Gender roles and status influence every social institution on the planet. From tribal indigenous people to the western world society has given men and women specific social constructions, roles, and obligations that affect work and family. Many of these social structures are easily seen throughout history and in modern day. We will be focusing on the workplace and how gender and societal roles impact men and women. We will also be looking at the similarities as well as the differences of roles for men and women in varying areas of work and family responsibilities around the world focusing on Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United states.

Americans watch an alarming amount of television starting from a young age. The average American watches five hours of television a day (Koblin 2016). This enormous amount of media input influences perceptions and is connected to cementing many things in people, such as gender roles. Gender roles are thoughts, actions, and feelings learned by a person fitting their gender due to cultural norms (Santrock 2016). Additionally, stereotypes appeal to people’s emotions and television shows are infamous for relying on them due to lack of time for character development (Signorielli 2001). Different television show categories reflect roles and representations of males and females in both

Gender Roles in media is how women and men are portrayed in everyday media such as tv shows, movies, and music. Today media can have negative effects on the thought of gender roles in the society because more and more people stereotype following the media, while stereotyping can lead to prejudices and gender discrimination. This is a controversial issue because men and women are depicted a certain way with unequal and identified gender-related stereotypes which influence the society of the 21st century. Men have always taken the dominant position in the society. The development of such a prejudiced view of gender roles caused the development of women’s inferiority. Gender roles in media effects cracking or breaking the

The gender roles of men and women were quite different in pre-20th-century drama. In his play Lysistrata, Aristophanes creates a world to bring about his thoughts on the Peloponnesian war with the comedic relief of gender role reversal. The women in his play are not necessarily the way women of his time were, but more of what men thought they were as well as what men feared or fantasized women could be like. Through action and dialogue, the play shows examples of several different types of women. Lysistrata, the main character, is a smart, cunning, and powerful woman while the other women in the play are on the opposite side of the spectrum; they fit the mold of the stereotypical female. These other women are dedicated to their husbands, remain in their homes, and when the possibility of sex being revoked occurs, they lose interest in politics.