Over the years, humanity has continued to advance towards equality and universal human rights. Nowadays and thanks to this, terms such as gender roles and stereotypes have appeared strongly in our panorama and are everywhere. But sometimes we are not very clear about what they are or what they consist of. Therefore, in this Psychology-Online article, we will talk about What are stereotypes and gender roles. We invite you to continue reading if you are interested in learning about these concepts and knowing what to do to avoid generating inequalities in our environment.
What is gender?
To begin with, it is important to know what gender is. This can be defined as a social construction of what is considered masculine or feminine. It should be said that it is not determined at birth and that, from a young age, we are taught to act according to the sex in which we were born.
Normally we do not realize it and sometimes even, unconsciously, we think that we are already born with a chip that makes us think, feel and act in accordance with our physical characteristics.
Differences between gender roles and stereotypes
They are terms that have quite a bit in common. Both are based on beliefs of our society and aim to differentiate us to divide the population into two large spheres: men and women, masculine and feminine. Despite this, to know what gender roles and stereotypes are, we can differentiate them in the following way:
Gender stereotypes
They are social and cultural beliefs that give us a series of characteristics for being a man or a woman. They assign us behaviors, ways of handling emotions and even ideas about our physical appearance. They can even assign us tastes for certain sports, movies and specific activities.
Many times stereotypes end up being a prejudice and they justify discrimination against all those people who share specific characteristics (or who do not follow established stereotypes). In our society, discrimination is mostly directed towards women and all the attitudes that surround them.
Gender roles
We could say that gender roles are like put stereotypes into practices in society. They are a set of behaviors, thoughts, emotions, feelings… everything what we are expected to do according to our gender. Roles can also mark traits of our personality, in them we find the explanation of why men do not cry or why women tend to suffer more.
Examples of gender stereotypes
We divide stereotypes according to the gender they are directed at.
Male Stereotypes
- Men are stronger and do not cry
- Men are better at sports
- Men don’t like to dance ballet
- Men are braver
- Men always want to flirt
- If a man has a lot of sexual relations, he is a winner
Female Stereotypes
- The girls are shorter and weaker
- Women don’t control their emotions
- Women are good at listening to other people’s problems.
- Women like to go shopping
- If a woman has a lot of sexual relations, she is an “easy” girl.
- Women who dress in short skirts are “easier”
Examples of roles
As we have pointed out previously, roles encompass a whole set of behaviors derived from stereotypes, so We can divide them in the same way.
male role
- Good leader
- Brave
- Rude and insistent
- Knows how to take care of himself
- He has things clear, he never doubts
- Knows how to face any situation
- Winner
- Master the public sphere
female role
- Emotional and sentimental
- fearful
- Doesn’t usually raise his voice
- Knows how to take care of others
- Responsible
- Knows how to follow orders
- Is she pretty or does she have to be?
- Master the private sphere
How gender roles and stereotypes affect us
As we have seen, roles and stereotypes are a pattern of very specific actions and emotions that can greatly limit our behavior. Furthermore, by becoming prejudices, society ends up attacking all people who do not follow the roles: women with strong attitudes, sensitive men, sexually active women…
Not only that, but it is possible to identify those people who do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, these people can suffer a lot throughout their lives, both due to confusion of thoughts and social pressure. Nobody asks us if we want to be a man or a woman, they just give us the label with which we end up living the rest of our lives.
On a social level, The main gender affected is female: Behaviors of weakness and submission are assigned to him in the face of the strength and power of the masculine. As mentioned before, these gender roles and stereotypes end up justifying discrimination and in this case, gender violence.
Our responsibility to improve
Once the problem has been stated, it is worth considering what we can do to change society and eliminate inequalities between people. It is clear that gender roles and stereotypes do us no good, so we should eliminate them little by little. To do this, we give the following advice:
- Identify stereotypes that we live day by day: at first it is complicated since these are things that we are taught from a young age. But little by little we see that, for example, because you are a man you don’t have to put up with crying or that because you are a woman you don’t have to be delicate.
- Point discriminatory attitudes, jokes, offensive comments and other attitudes that prevent a person from being themselves free of stereotypes.
- Report cases in which discrimination ends in abuse or violence.
Finally, we must remember that there is no role that encompasses only women and only men, there are people who do not identify with either or who identify with both.
Getting rid of gender roles and stereotypes is as simple as value people for who they are and how they behave with others, not how they are expected to act based on the sex they were born with.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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