Gender-role socilization. this essay is about how society and biological drives and instincts shape the gender roles.

Essay by onegaiCollege, Undergraduate January 2004

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Gender socialization is the way society shapes our sexual attitudes and behavior through various mechanisms, it defines the roles that we as males or females in society are expected to play.

According to Ann Oakley, who first introduced the terms, sex refers to the biological divisions into being male or female while gender reflects the parallel and socially unequal division into being feminine or masculine (Sex, Gender and Society 1972). Sex is therefore can be seen as the biological constructed aspect of differences between men and women. As oppose to sex, gender can be seen as the socially constructed knowledge, values and practices linked to sex based differences mostly by the process of socialization. The term gender has been extended since than and not only reflects the individual identity and personality but also, at the symbolic level, to cultural ideals and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity.

Gender roles are the societal expectations attached to being male and female.

Through gender role socialization, a person is introduced and taught the behaviors expected to be played by them. The home often called 'gender factory' by some sociologists, reproduces society's traditional gender roles through parental reinforcement (Appelbaum and Chambliss, 223). From birth to death, males and females are constructed to act according to society's mold of gender identity. Parents describe their newborns with adjectives pertaining to traditional gender roles. Newborn girls are described as "tiny, soft, delicate, and fine-featured," while newborn boys are described as "strong, alert, and well coordinate" (223). Even during breast-feeding gender divides, males are treated rougher and given more milk while females are treated delicately and given less.

This can best be illustrated by an experiment to show how gender stereotyping enters almost every part of an infant since the day he or she was born. The experiment better...