1. Our Gendered Identities
Chapter 3
Our Gendered Identities

2. Chapter Outline Gendered Identities How Did Gender Roles Emerge?
Gender Structures
Gender and Socialization
Gender and Social Change

3. Gendered Identities
Gender identity refers to the degree to which an individual sees herself or himself as feminine or masculine based on society’s definitions of gender roles.
Sex is used in reference to male or female anatomy and physiology, and includes the chromosomal, hormonal, and anatomical components of males and females.
Gender (or gender role) refers to societal attitudes and behaviors associated with the two sexes.

4. Gendered Identities
Intersexed individuals have ambiguous genital anatomy.
Transsexual and transgendered individuals are uncomfortable with the gender that society has assigned them.
Gender bending involves explicitly challenging a gender mandate.

5. Issues for Thought: Challenges to Gender Boundaries
Between 1 and 4% of live births are intersexual.
The child has anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal variations from the male or female biology that is considered normal.
Transsexuals are raised as one sex, while emotionally identifying with the other sex.
Transgendered describes an identity adopted by those who are uncomfortable in the gender of their birth.

6. Issues for Thought: Challenges to Gender Boundaries
Have transgendered individuals been politically visible in your campus or community?
What are your own thoughts as to whether gender is a dichotomy or a continuum along which individuals may vary?
How do such challenges to gender boundaries potentially impact our roles and experiences within the family?

7. Cultural Gender Expectations
Gender differentiation is apparent in our cultural expectations about how men and women should behave.
Masculine people are often thought to have instrumental (or agentic) character traits – confidence, assertiveness, and ambition – that enable them to accomplish difficult tasks or goals.
Feminine people are thought to embody expressive (or communal) character traits – warmth, sensitivity, the ability to express tender feelings, and placing concern about others above self-interest.

8. Masculinities
Men are culturally obligated to be involved in 1) group leadership, 2) protecting group territory and weaker or dependent others, and 3) providing resources.
Men are expected to distance themselves from anything considered feminine.
A man should be financially successful, or at least be working to support his family.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, masculinity transformed to include the man who takes traumatic events head-on but feels free to shed tears after doing so.

9. Femininities
The pivotal expectation for a woman requires her to offer emotional support.
The ideal woman was physically attractive, not too competitive, a good listener, and adaptable.
She was considered fortunate if she had a man in her life and was expected to be a good mother and put her family’s and children’s needs before her own.

10. New Cultural Models for Women
The professional woman: independent, ambitious, self confident
The superwoman: A good wife and/or mother attains career success and supports her children by herself
The satisfied single: a woman (heterosexual or lesbian, employed, possibly a parent) who is happy and not in a serious relationship with a male

11. The Relative Values of Masculinity versus Femininity
Mainstream culture values masculinity more highly than femininity.
A woman lives with bifurcated consciousness.

12. Cultural Expectations and Role Performance
Dramaturgy sees individuals as enacting culturally constituted scripts and socially prescribed roles in front of others.
People “do” gender everyday.

13. To what extent do women and men follow cultural expectations?
In adult life, women seem to have greater connectedness in interpersonal relations and, perhaps due to gender stereotypes, are pushed into caregiving professions.
Men tend to be more competitive.
But there is great individual variation; situational context accounts for much of the difference.

14. To what extent do women and men follow cultural expectations?
Psychologist Janet Hyde found that males and females are similar on most psychological variables.
Hyde found virtually no difference on most traits, a few moderate differences, and very few large differences.

15. Traits in Men and Women
How females and males differ on height, conceptualized as overlapping normal distribution curves.

16. Race/Ethnic Diversity and Gendered Expectations
Traditional gender stereotypes were based on a white, middle-class, heterosexual experience.
Different norms pervade according to immigration patterns and experiences as well as within different ethnic groups and social classes.

17. Ethnicity and Gender
Native Americans, members of what were once hunting and gathering and hoe cultures, have a complex heritage that varies by tribe but may include a matrilineal tradition in which women owned houses, tools, and land.

18. How Did Gender Roles Emerge?
Biology-Based Arguments
Society-Based Arguments

19. Biology-Based Arguments
Are gender differences anchored in biology?
Biologists have relinquished deterministic models in their thinking about gender and family.
Sociologists are finding complex interactions among gender, social roles, and biological indicators rather than categorical gender differences.

20. Biology-Based Arguments
It is safe to say that there is convergence on the opinion that in gender, as well as other behavior, biology interacts with culture in complex and constantly changing ways that cannot be reduced to biological determinism.
Although adult men and women seem to be converging in social roles and personal qualities, gender differences seem powerful in younger years via the process of socialization.

21. Society-Based Arguments
Examining broad economic stages in human history shows how gender roles emerged.
Foraging and Hoe Societies
Agricultural Societies
Industrial Societies
Postindustrial Societies

22. Gender Structures
Institutional structures are gendered and have profound implications for influencing the ways that people enact gender.
Institutions in virtually every society have been characterized by patriarchy and male dominance.

23. Religion
Most U.S. congregations have more female than male participants, yet men hold more positions of authority.
Women are prohibited from holding Catholic clerical or lay deacon positions.
Actual practice among religious people often is more egalitarian than strict religious teachings.

24. Government and Politics
Although slightly more than 50 percent of the population, women are still significantly underrepresented in high government positions.
As of 2013, in the U.S. Congress, there were 20 women in the Senate and 97 in the House of Representatives
Surveys report that 71% of the public say they would be willing to vote for a woman for president, but only 56% believe their family, friends, and coworkers are willing to do so.

25. Women in Politics
The first female candidate for U.S. president was Victoria Woodhull in 1972.
In 2012, several women vied for the U.S. Presidency and Vice Presidency, though not from major parties.

26. Education
Women have been the majority of college students since 1979 and now surpass men in the proportion of the total population that are college graduates.
In 2009, women earned 57% of bachelor’s degrees, 60 % of master’s degrees, 49% of first professional degrees, and 48% of doctorates.

27. Education
Although women students outnumber men in colleges and universities, there is still gender differentiation in their choice of majors.
In 2009, 14% of associate’s degrees in engineering went to women while 87% in nursing went to women.

28. Economics
In 2011, women who were employed full time earned 82% of what men earned.
Sex, race and ethnicity all converge into wage disparity.
Overall, the earnings gap between men and women narrowed in recent decades, but that gap is widening slightly again.

29. Female-to-Male Earnings Ratio

30. Gender and Socialization
Process by which people develop their human capacities and acquire a unique personality and identity and by which culture is passed from generation to generation

31. Theories of Socialization
Classic Interactionist Constructionist Perspective
Children develop self-concepts based on feedback from those around them.
Social Learning Theory
Children learn gender roles as they are taught by parents, schools, and the media.

32. Theories of Socialization
Self-identification theory
Children categorize themselves by age 3 and identify behaviors in their families, the media, and elsewhere that are appropriate to their sex and adopt these behaviors.
Gender Schema Theory
Children develop a frame of knowledge about what girls and boys typically do, and then use this framework to interpret and think about gender.

33. Settings for Socialization
Boys and Girls in the Family
Play and Games
The Power of Cultural Images
Socialization in Schools

34. Gender Socialization in Families
Encouragement of gender-typed interests and activities continues:
Girls have more dolls, fictional characters, children’s furniture, and the color pink.
Boys have more sports equipment, tools, toy vehicles, and the colors red, blue, and white.

35. Play and Games Toys send messages about gender roles.
What does this toy say?

36. Gender Socialization in Families
Encouragement of gender-typed interests and activities continues:
Fathers more than mothers enforce gender stereotypes, especially for sons. It is more acceptable, for example, for girls to be tomboys.
Exploratory behavior is encouraged more in boys than in girls.
Household chores (number and kinds) adhere to gendered notions.
However, this varies by race/ethnicity. For example, African American girls are raised to be more independent and less passive.

37. Socialization in Schools
More men are in positions of authority (principals) and women are in positions of service (teachers and secretaries).
Teachers pay more attention to males than to females.
Males tend to dominate learning environments from nursery school to college.

38. Gender Socialization in Schools
The changing gender balance in education has led to cries of alarm that men/boys are disadvantaged by educational systems.
However the data have made visible two patterns:
College achievement gap is greater among racial/ethnic groups within gender categories
Apparent difference between males and females in goals and attitudes toward schooling

39. Gender and Social Change
Changes in men’s and women’s social roles have been influenced by changes in structural forces and by active change efforts.
The Women’s Movement
The Men’s Movement

40. Sexism
Traditional sexism is the belief that women’s roles should be confined to the family and that women are not as fit as men for certain tasks or for leadership positions.
Modern sexism denies that gender discrimination persists and includes the belief that women are asking for too much—a situation that results in resistance to women’s demands.

41. The Women’s Movement
The 19th century saw a feminist movement develop, but from 1920 until the mid-1960s, there was virtually no activism regarding women’s rights and roles.
The Civil Rights Movement provided a model by which the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement challenged accepted traditional roles and strove to increase gender equality.
Some women of color and white working-class women find the Women’s Movement irrelevant to their personal and social struggles and experiences.

42. Men’s Movements
Antifeminists believe that the Women’s Movement caused the collapse of the natural order, one that guaranteed male dominance, and they work to reverse this trend.
Profeminists support feminists in their opposition to patriarchy.
Masculinists tend not to focus on patriarchy as problematic, but work to develop a positive image of masculinity, one combining strength with tenderness.

43. Gender and Family in the Future
Despite dramatic and unprecedented change over the past fifty years, society persists in emphasizing the public sphere as more important to masculinity and the private sphere to femininity.

44. The Costs of Following Traditional Gender Expectations
Both men and women pay a price for gender as traditionally structured.
Inequities in life expectancy and poverty rates are tied to traditional gender expectations.