Gender Messages Gender Roles Are the Behaviors Essay

Gender Messages

Gender roles are the behaviors and traits and expectations that are linked to women and men through socialization, according to Janice Lee and Amie Ashcraft (2005). In fact gender roles define what it means to be a feminine or masculine person. During one's lifetime there is an enormous amount of social pressure to "conform to these gender roles" (Lee, 2005). This paper examines the gender roles learned from family, school, and from the media. People who fail to behave "…according to gender stereotypes are judged less likable, competent, and attractive" than those who do show appropriate traits and behaviors that match their gender (Lee, 7).

Gender role association learned from family

The individual begins to learn his or her gender role not long after birth, associating the values and beliefs that are associated with "masculinity and femininity" from the family. The mother in a family fills the role of care-giving for the daughter through her acts of "…nurturance, compassion, and dependence" (Lee, 2005, 7). Males learn gender roles from fathers that include "…aggression, dominance, and assertiveness." Growing up in a patriarchal household, John Lie was told by his grandfather that "…a man should never be seen in the kitchen"; he recalled seeing women's liberation demonstrations on television and he dismissed them as "…slightly crazed, bra-burning man haters" (Brym, et al., 2009).Everything he read, heard, and saw within the family context led him to believe "…the gender division of labor was natural." Gender Stratification: From the perspective of a patriarchal family role-association, "doctors, pilots and professors should be men," but teachers and nurses should be women (Brym, 288).

Gender role association learned from school experiences

Gender differences are on full display in public schools: males learn gender roles from the fact that shop classes and auto mechanics classes are for boys and home economic and cooking classes are mainly intended for girls. Even in teacher-student interactions, teachers "react differently to girls and boys"; male students receive more attention in class and are given more time to talk in class (Long, 2011). Boys get called on more than girls do; and boys are "eight times more likely to call out answers" than girls are; in addition, boys receive more "precise feedback from teachers-praise, criticism, or….....