Women's Roles

A gender role, or sex role, is a social norm deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their gender or sex.

Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions 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 (and perceived 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,Levesque R.J.R. (2011)
Sex Roles and Gender Roles
''. In: Levesque R.J.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, New York, NY. . Retrieved 22 January 2018. 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, whereas male politicians are perceived to be better at dealing with crime and foreign affairs. That view lines up with the most common gender stereotypes.

It has also been predicted that gender highly matters only for female candidates that have not been politically established. These predictions apply further to established candidates, stating that gender would not be a defining factor for their campaigns or the focal point of media coverage. This has been refuted by multiple scholars, often based on Hillary Clinton's multiple campaigns for the office of President of the United States.

Additionally, when voters have little information about a female candidate, they are likely to view her as being a stereotypical woman which they often take as a basis for not electing her because they consider typical male qualities as being crucial for someone holding a political office.

Feminism and women's rights

Throughout the 20th century, women in the United States saw a dramatic shift in social and professional aspirations and norms. Following the Women's Suffrage Movement of the late-nineteenth century, which resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment allowing women to vote, and in combination with conflicts in Europe, WWI and WWII, women found themselves shifted into the industrial workforce. During this time, women were expected to take up industrial jobs and support the troops abroad through the means of domestic industry. Moving from "homemakers" and "caregivers", women were now factory workers and "breadwinners" for the family.

However, after the war, men returned home to the United States and women, again, saw a shift in social and professional dynamics. With the reuniting of the nuclear family, the ideals of American Suburbia boomed. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, middle-class families moved in droves from urban living into newly developed single-family homes on former farmland just outside major cities. Thus established what many modern critics describe as the "private sphere". Though frequently sold and idealized as "perfect living", many women had difficulty adjusting to the new "private sphere". Writer Betty Friedan described this discontent as "The Feminine Mystique, the feminine mystique". The "mystique" was derived from women equipped with the knowledge, skills, and aspirations of the workforce, the "public sphere", who felt compelled whether socially or morally to devote themselves to the home and family.

One major concern of feminism, is that women occupy lower-ranking job positions than men, and do most of the housework. A recent (October 2009) report from the Center for American Progress, "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" tells us that women now make up 48% of the US workforce and "mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in a majority of families" (63.3%, see figure 2, page 19 of the Executive Summary of The Shriver Report).

Another recent article in ''The New York Times'' indicates that young women today are closing the pay gap. Luisita Lopez Torregrosa has noted, "Women are ahead of men in education (last year, 55 percent of U.S. college graduates were female). And a study shows that in most U.S. cities, single, childless women under 30 are making an average of 8 percent more money than their male counterparts, with Atlanta and Miami in the lead at 20 percent."

Feminist theory generally defines gender as a social construct that includes ideologies governing feminine/masculine (female/male) appearances, actions, and behaviors. An example of these gender roles would be that males were supposed to be the educated breadwinners of the family, and occupiers of the public sphere whereas, the female's duty was to be a homemaker, take care of her husband and children, and occupy the private sphere. According to contemporary gender role ideology, gender roles are continuously changing. This can be seen in Londa Schiebinger's ''Has Feminism Changed Science'', in which she states, "Gendered characteristics – typically masculine or feminine behaviors, interests, or values-are not innate, nor are they arbitrary. They are formed by historical circumstances. They can also change with historical circumstances."

One example of the contemporary definition of gender was depicted in Sally Shuttleworth's ''Female Circulation'' in which the, "abasement of the woman, reducing her from an active participant in the labor market to the passive bodily existence to be controlled by male expertise is indicative of the ways in which the ideological deployment of gender roles operated to facilitate and sustain the changing structure of familial and market relations in Victorian England." In other words, this shows what it meant to grow up into the roles (gender roles) of a female in Victorian England, which transitioned from being a homemaker to being a working woman and then back to being passive and inferior to males. In conclusion, gender roles in the contemporary sex gender model are socially constructed, always changing, and do not really exist since they are ideologies that society constructs in order for various benefits at various times in history.

Men's rights

The men's rights movement (MRM) is a part of the larger men's movement. It branched off from the men's liberation movement in the early-1970s. The men's rights movement is made up of a variety of groups and individuals who are concerned about what they consider to be issues of male disadvantage, discrimination and oppression. The movement focuses on issues in numerous areas of society (including family law, parenting, reproduction, domestic violence) and government services (including education, compulsory military service, social safety nets, and health policies) that they believe discriminate against men.

Scholars consider the men's rights movement or parts of the movement to be a backlash (sociology), backlash to feminism.See, for example:
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* The men's rights movement denies that men are privileged relative to women. The movement is divided into two camps: those who consider men and women to be harmed equally by sexism, and those who view society as endorsing the degradation of men and upholding female privilege.

Men's rights groups have called for male-focused governmental structures to address issues specific to men and boys including education, health, work and marriage. Men's rights groups in India have called for the creation of a Men's Welfare Ministry and a National Commission for Men, as well as the abolition of the National Commission for Women. In the United Kingdom, the creation of a Minister for Men analogous to the existing Minister for Women (United Kingdom), Minister for Women, have been proposed by David Amess, MP and Lord Northbourne, but were rejected by the government of Tony Blair. In the United States, Warren Farrell heads a commission focused on the creation of a "White House Council on Boys and Men" as a counterpart to the "White House Council on Women and Girls" which was formed in March 2009.

Related to this is the Father's Rights Movement, whose members seek social and political reforms that affect fathers and their children. These individuals contest that societal institutions such as family courts, and laws relating to child custody and child support payments, are gender biased in favor of mothers as the default caregiver. They therefore are systemically discriminatory against males regardless of their actual caregiving ability, because males are typically seen as the bread-winner, and females as the care-giver.

Gender neutrality

Gender neutrality is the movement to end discrimination of gender altogether in society through means of gender neutral language, the end of sex segregation and other means.

Transgender and cross-dressing

Transgender is the state of one's gender identity or gender expression not matching one's assigned sex. Transgender is independent of sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.; some may consider conventional sexual orientation labels inadequate or inapplicable to them. The definition of ''transgender'' includes:
* "Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex."
* "People who were assigned a sex, usually at birth and based on their genitals, but who feel that this is a false or incomplete description of themselves."USI LGBT Campaign – Transgender Campaign
. Retrieved 11 January 2012.
* "Non-identification with, or non-presentation as, the sex (and assumed gender) one was assigned at birth."

While people self-identify as transgender, the transgender identity umbrella includes sometimes-overlapping categories. These include transsexual; cross-dresser; genderqueer; Androgyny, androgyne; and bigender. Usually not included are transvestic fetishists (because it is considered to be a paraphilia rather than gender identification), and drag kings and drag queens, who are performers who cross-dress for the purpose of entertaining. In an interview, celebrity drag queen RuPaul talked about society's ambivalence to the differences in the people who embody these terms. "A friend of mine recently did the ''The Oprah Winfrey Show, Oprah'' show about transgender youth", said RuPaul. "It was obvious that we, as a culture, have a hard time trying to understand the difference between a drag queen, transsexual, and a transgender, yet we find it very easy to know the difference between the American League, American baseball league and the National League (baseball), National baseball league, when they are both so similar."n:RuPaul speaks about society and the state of drag as performance art, Interview with RuPaul, David Shankbone, ''Wikinews'', 6 October 2007.

By country

* Gender roles and fluidity in indigenous Nigerian cultures
* Gender roles among the Indigenous peoples of North America
* Gender roles in Afghanistan
* Gender roles in childhood
* Gender roles in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe
* Gender roles in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
* Gender roles in Sri Lanka

See also

* Anti-gender movement
* Childhood gender nonconformity
* Dominatrix
* Gender bender
* Gender polarization
* Gender policing
* Locus of control#Gender-based differences
* Male expendability
* Misandry
* Misogyny
* Sex and gender distinction
* Sexual inversion (sexology)
* Women and children first
* Women-are-wonderful effect

References

External links

OHCHR , Gender stereotyping
A short summary of international treaties concerning gender stereotyping.

Surveys on gender roles
by the Pew Research Center

Gender Communication Barriers and Techniques
Strategic Communications, ''Stanford Graduate School of Business''. Serves to help develop communication skills.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gender Role
1950s neologisms
Articles containing video clips
Feminist terminology
Gender roles,
Role theory
Role status
Gender-related stereotypes, Role
Social conservatism