Gender roles

Gender Roles

Now a day, gender roles are always playing major parts in our way of life. Gender roles are always being passed on and developing, since a baby is born. This mean that automatically if the baby is a girl everybody buys pink things for her and if the baby is a boy everybody is going to buy blue things for him (“girls play with dolls & boys with cars”)1.
Although parents disagreeabout this idea, society and media are always emphasizing in the difference about gender roles (woman must be “polite” and the men “strong and hard”). The roles of men y women & the social rules that dictate appropriate behavior for each , are not structured only by the biology part, this plays only a few part of the role because the environment have the biggest part of influence.
Moreover, whenthere is absence of any of the two parents of the children do not have clear roles that these have to exercise in the family. For example, if there is a single mother in charge of a family, by consequence a father figure is not always present or vice versa. This leaves the parent under a lot of pressure so he thinks that he have to demonstrate “love” with material things.

Influence of toys ingender roles

Another stuff that influence the gender roles are the toys children play with. This is like reinforcement during their infancy and toddlerhood and almost all the kids get their toys from friends, parents or other family members. Many of their choices of toys confirm or support their personal point of view about gender roles. For example, almost all the parents may give their babygirl a “Barbie” to play with or a “beauty set” for paint their nails, while the boy gets an “action-man” (like we said in the first paragraph)1 . Those gifts support the own view of the kids of what gender role they are expected to have.

School as part of the reinforcement about gender roles

In the childhood, school and teachers take a great influence in gender roles when they teach someexpectations and cultural information. There are many expectations of how boys and girls have to be; it is only a complement of the many things that the kids learn from their parents, but also the school has a significant part of the elementary education of the children. But even thought the teachers gives a good orientation about gender roles, many kids in society don't know what to think or how toact when they see other actions outside the traditional male and female gender roles like gays and lesbians. We think that if we could explain to the children about the term homosexuality, how to interact with this people and don’t judge these homosexual persons maybe we can have more liberty adopting a gender role without having to push a kid with subliminal messages.


Talking about jobsProductive work is shared by men & women now, but for women it is primarily defined in terms of their maternal and family role. Jobs were initially generated for men because they were strong. But now the barrier is broken & socially accepted for who they are & not for the role they HAVE TO play or they are expected to have in society.

Sources

Faqs.org, Gender roles, Information aboutGender roles, January 15th 2010 http://www.faqs.org/health/topics/8/Gender-roles.html#ixzz1C64p2rMt

D. E. Campbell, Gender roles and schools, Pearson Allyn Bacon Prentice Hall, 2010
http://www.education.com/reference/article/gender-roles-schools/

Economic Activities Shared by Male & Female
The social inequalities between men and women have ancient roots from patriarchy and its manifestationsare found in all areas of social life. Economic censuses are a source of statistical information that allows you to know how, where, why and how much producing enterprises; as well as the number of people working in the establishments and undertakings of this amount are men and many are women.
The incorporation massive influx of women to work valued and employed, is one of the aspects that have...