What is Gender Stereotyping?

Gender -masculine or feminine behaviors - features that are not assigned due to biological sex but social roles that men and women hold. Sex: biological and physical attributes

What is the difference between GENDER and SEX?

Pat is active, independent, competitive, and aggressive. Is Pat male or female?

Most people assume Pat is male. Why?

Although Pat is a common name for both males and females, the adjectives used to describe Pat are commonly associated with men rather than with women.

Stereotype Set of beliefs about a certain group of people.

Stereotype

Gender stereotyping Beliefs humans hold about the characteristics associated with males and females. People form ideas of what males and females should be, accumulating characteristics and assigning labels to those categories.

Gentle, Soft-spoken, obedient person is a GIRL.

Rough, Noisy person is a BOY.

Problems exist Characteristics of gender have a negative image. Unique individual is assumed to have all the characteristics with his/her gender.

One idea is that girls are more confident on classroom tests than on achievement tests. The achievement test questions are more novel than classroom test questions. Because they are not as confident… they don’t do as well. Boys are more confident in their math skills and like the challenge of novel problems. Math is also a stereotypic male pursuit so girls tend to lack confidence in their math skills

Problems exists In a classroom, boys are more likely to have a hard time sitting still than girls. On a playground, boys more often play vigorously and girls more often play quietly.

Intellectual Ability Females tend to have greater verbal ability than males – Girls read, write, and spell better than boys – More boys have reading and other language- related problems such as stuttering

Gender ideologies Attitudes toward men’s and women’s roles. – Traditional gender ideology – Egalitarian gender ideology – Transitional gender ideology

Traditional gender ideology Men’s sphere is work and women’s sphere is home.

Egalitarian gender ideology Power distributed equally between men and women

Transitional gender ideology Acceptable for women to devote energy to both work and family domains but more responsibility for the home. Men should focus propositionally more their energy on work.

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