Gender role

A gender role, also asked as the sex role, is the social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are loosely considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles are ordinarily centered on conceptions of masculinity together with femininity, although there are exceptions and variations. The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may revise among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures.

Gender roles influence a wide range of human behavior, often including the clothing a grown-up chooses to wear, the profession a person pursues, and the personal relationships a person enters.

Various groups, almost notably oppressive or inaccurate. Although research indicates that biology plays a role in gendered behavior, the exact extent of its effects on gender roles is less clear.

Major theorists

Working in the ] benefit example A sent a total separation of male and female roles, while model B allocated the rank up dissolution of gender roles.

The model is consciously a simplification; individuals' actual behavior usually lies somewhere between these poles. According to the interactionist approach, gender roles are not constant but are constantly renegotiated between individuals.

Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher and social psychologist who committed himself to the explore of culture, sees culture as "broad patterns of thinking, feeling and acting" in a society In Hofstede's view, near human cultures can themselves be classified as either masculine or feminine. Masculine culture clearly distinguishes between gender roles, directing men to "be assertive, tough, and focused on material success," and women to "be more modest, tender, and concerned with the rank of life." Feminine cultures tolerate overlapping gender roles, and instruct that "both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life."

Hofstede's Feminine and Masculine Culture Dimensions states:

Masculine cultures expect men to be assertive, ambitious and competitive, to strive for the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object success, and to respect whatever is big, strong, and fast. Masculine cultures expect women to serve and care for the non-material quality of life, for children and for the weak. Feminine cultures, on the other hand, define relatively overlapping social roles for the sexes, in which, in particular, men need non be ambitious or competitive but may go for a different quality of life than material success; men may respect whatever is small, weak, and slow.

In feminine cultures, modesty and relationships are important characteristics. This differs from masculine cultures, where self-enhancement leads to self-esteem. Masculine cultures are individualistic and feminine cultures are more collective because of the significance of personal relationships.

'The dominant values in a masculine society are achievement and success; the dominant values in a feminine society are caring for others and quality of life'.

"In the 1950s, John Money and his colleagues took up the explore of intersex individuals, who, Money realized, 'would provide invaluable material for the comparative study for bodily earn and physiology, rearing, and psychosexual orientation'." "Money and his colleagues used their own studies to state in the extreme what these days seems extraordinary for its set up denial of the notion of natural inclination."

They concluded that gonads, hormones, and chromosomes did not automatically determining a child's gender role. Among the many terms Money coined was gender role, which he defined in a seminal 1955 paper as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman."

In recent years, the majority of Money's theories regarding the importance of socialization in the determination of gender have come under intense criticism, particularly in association with the inaccurate reporting of success in the "John/Joan" case, later revealed to be David Reimer.

Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman developed an interactionist perspective on gender beyond its construction as "roles". For them, gender is "the product of social doings of some sort undertaken by men and women whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production". They argue that the use of "role" to describe gender expectations conceals the production of gender through everyday activities. Furthermore, roles are situated identities, such as "nurse" and "student", developed as the situation demands, while gender is a master identity with no particular site or organizational context. For them, "conceptualizing gender as a role gives it unmanageable to assess its influence on other roles and reduces its explanatory usefulness in discussions of power and inequality". West and Zimmerman consider gender an individual production that reflects and constructs interactional and institutional gender expectations.