Which of the following is a likely reason that boys may find it difficult to learn the masculine gender role?

Abstract

Gender roles are the behaviors men and women exhibit in the private and public realm. They are the sociocultural expectations that apply to individuals on the basis of their assignment to a sex category (male or female). Usually an individual’s sex is determined by how their genitalia look at birth. Since the 1970s, when feminists in particular made a distinction between sex and gender, the prescriptive nature of socially assigned gender roles has been challenged. More recently, the prescriptive nature of socially assigned sex roles has also been contested. This article will focus primarily on gender roles as they have developed in a twentieth-century context. Some discussion of the intersection between gender roles and sexual roles will also be included.

Gender

Research on gender roles and aging involves viewing maleness and femaleness as more than demographic or ascribed characteristics. It begins by distinguishing between sex – biological differences between males and females – and gender – cultural distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Gender is not a biological given, but is what people collectively agree that sex attributes mean. Societies construct men and women differently, and those differences reflect and perpetuate inequalities. To understand these inequities, scholars focus on gender relations: dynamic, constructed power relations embedded in social processes and institutionalized in social arenas, with consequences for life chances. As a concept, gender relations emphasizes that gender serves as a social organizing principle and that men and women gain identities and power in relation to one another. Because they result from social interaction, gender relations are dynamic. What is considered masculine and feminine varies by culture, by time, and across groups within cultures – including age cohorts. This translation of sex into gender shapes men's and women's experiences across the life course and into old age.

Gender is embedded in social relationships at all levels, from individual interactions and identities to institutional processes. Societies organize on the basis of gender such that what is taken to be masculine and feminine influences and reflects a division of labor, the performance of which is evaluated and rewarded in a differential fashion. Thus, the gender identities that emerge in social interaction also serve to privilege men – give them an unearned advantage – while they usually disadvantage women, even as people resist and reformulate seemingly natural gender differences and meanings.

Gender relations are systematic, embedded in patterns of behavior such that they are taken for granted as simply the way things (i.e., families, jobs) work or the way things are. Thus, even though individuals enact them, gender relations are not dependent upon any one individual's actions or intentions, and they are often invisible. Because men's privileges are intimately tied to women's disadvantages, the situation of one group cannot be understood without at least implicit reference to the position of the other.

Gender relations underlie gender roles – behaviors that are expected of men and women in institutional situations (such as family, work, public, recreational, and other settings), based on their gender. Gender roles are upheld by ideologies (systems of beliefs) that justify the appropriateness of these behaviors. As one example, we relegate care tasks to women in a variety of situations, whether they involve physical activities such as cooking and cleaning or emotional carework. Women are the ones who should provide care within families (gender role) because they are, by their nature, more nurturing (ideology). Because we assume that girls are more nurturing than boys, we give girls dolls but give boys trucks. Then, when they grow up to emulate these beliefs and develop divergent skills, we take that as evidence that these differences are natural and that men's privileges in the family and work spheres are somehow more deserved. Further, because carework is natural and is performed out of love (ideology), it need not be remunerated. Women are segregated in carework professions and are paid less than men in positions of comparable worth for these reasons. The relatively low pay renders many women dependent on male breadwinners. The ability of men as a group to be breadwinners (gender role), to compete with other men for status and wealth and make significant wages, also rests upon the often invisible, unpaid carework and reproductive labor provided by women in family homes (gender role) out of love. Because these gender relations are embedded in the structures and collective beliefs of families, they do not depend upon any individual's intentions.

Concluding Remarks

Adolescence represents an important period for gender-role development. Some components of gender-role identity, attitudes, behavior, and mental health have their roots in childhood. Other components develop in response to the unique physical and psychological challenges of adolescence. The nature of gender-role development depends on individual factors, as well as on the influence of parents, siblings, peers, teachers, and others in the adolescent's life. The gender roles that adolescents develop have important implications for the choices they make and the opportunities available to them. Despite the impact of adolescent gender roles on relationships, educational choices, occupational paths, and other aspects of adolescent and adult life, little research has been conducted on adolescent gender development compared with the vast literature on childhood gender development. Additional research in this area will enhance our understanding of the nature of gender development in adolescence.

Gender roles

Gender roles can be conceptualized as behavioral expectations based on biological sex. Traditionally, for men to be masculine, they are expected to display attributes such as strength, power, and competitiveness, and less openly display emotion and affection (especially toward other men). Gender-role stress (or discrepancy) arises when individuals feel that they are deviating from their prescribed gender role. Both gender roles and gender-role stress have been associated with body image attitudes in men. Generally speaking, men who espouse a more traditional ideology about men’s roles report a higher desire for muscularity and may feel that achieving the mesomorphic ideal is a mechanism through which they can meet the gender-role expectations of power and control. Furthermore, gender-role discrepancy has been associated with body dissatisfaction and higher drive for muscularity.

IV Recommendations for Future Gender Role Conflict Research with Culturally Diverse Populations

Gender role conflict research with African American, Asian American, and Latino men is scarce, and scarcer still with women of color and Native American men. The theoretical foundation of such research must be based upon the cultures and values of people of color. Furthermore, qualitative studies are as important as quantitative studies in shedding light on the complexity of GRC. Ideally, qualitative research should inform the development of instruments or refinement of existing instruments for the measurement of GRC, femininity, masculinity, and other gender-related concepts in people of color. Further, femininity-masculinity measures should assess both positive and negative feminine characteristics and masculine characteristics. Researchers should avoid using Deficit Models or terms—a case in point is the concept, machismo, which has been described as a deficit concept (Félix-Ortíz et al., 2012). Finally, GRC research is greatly needed with the explicit purpose of discovering treatment interventions. According to O’Neil (2008, p. 398), “ no research exists on how to treat GRC in therapy, and therefore evaluated interventions are needed.”

Measurement of Gender-Role Attitudes

Gender-role attitudes have been operationalized and measured in a range of ways (Davis & Greenstein, 2009; McHugh & Frieze, 1997; Vespa, 2009). Although some work has used interviews and participant observation to categorize individual gender-role ideologies (e.g., Hochschild & Machung, 1989), typically, self-report surveys are used to ask respondents whether they agree or disagree with a series of statements about women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities (Davis & Greenstein, 2009). Davis and Greenstein (2009) identified six common dimensions across the various ways in which researchers have conceptualized and measured gender-role attitudes: (1) belief in separate spheres based on gender; (2) primacy of the breadwinner role; (3) motherhood and the feminine self; (4) working women and relationship quality; (5) household utility; and (6) male-privilege acceptance. For example, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its Child/Young Adult Supplement (Center for Human Resource Research, 2006) includes an item, “A woman’s place is in the home, not in the office or shop,” tapping belief in gendered separate spheres. Readers are encouraged to consult McHugh and Frieze (1997) and Davis and Greenstein (2009) for more thorough reviews of gender-role attitude measurement strategies.

Changing expectations in continuing roles

In addition to fulfilling age-graded roles, expectations for role enactment in continuing roles also change. For example, the role of student, which begins in early childhood, continues through adolescence, often well into the 20s. However, adolescent students are expected to work more independently than younger students, to study more difficult material, to relate to eight or nine different teachers, to know how to use library and online resources, and to balance their study time with other activities and commitments. The following discussion of gender-role standards illustrates the convergence of developmental and societal changes that may prompt revisions in role enactment for a continuing role.

Gender Roles

Gender role expectations may have an impact on underachievement and creativity. Creative individuals seem to diverge from sex norms because both sensitivity, which is traditionally a feminine virtue, and independence, which is considered to be a masculine virtue, are essential for creativity. Torrance indicated in 2004 that some students may sacrifice their creativity in order to maintain their masculinity or their femininity, which can lead to emotional issues and other problems for highly creative students. Teachers who are sensitive to gender issues among their students are in a position to soften the negative impact of sex-role stereotyping.

Environmental Factors

GENDER-ROLE ORIENTATION

Another gender-role construct that has been overlooked in the WF literature is gender-role orientation. Because previous research has used demographic gender as a proxy for gender-role orientation, an examination of gender-role orientation might explain some of the puzzling differences between men and women that have been found in the WF literature.

Gender-role orientation is conceptualized as a bidimensional construct. The two underlying dimensions are instrumentality (also known as masculinity or agency) and expressivity (also known as femininity or communion). Individuals who are sex-typed are socialized to have more characteristics from one dimension than the other (Bem, 1974). Thus, those high on expressivity and low on instrumentality are labeled feminine, while those high on instrumentality and low on expressivity are considered to be masculine. Androgynous individuals are above the medians on both dimensions, whereas undifferentiated individuals are below the medians on both dimensions (Korabik, 1999). Masculine and feminine individuals will interpret, evaluate, and organize information in terms of traditional gender-role appropriateness (e.g., women should be responsible for housework and men should financially support the family through paid employment; Bern, 1981). Androgynous and undifferentiated people have a weak gender schema and, therefore, do not categorize information according to gender appropriateness (Bern, 1981).

Livingston and Burley (1991) did not find a significant relationship between gender-role orientation and future expectations of WF conflict in a sample of university students from the US. By contrast, we examined the relationship between gender-role orientation and present experiences of WF conflict in a study conducted in Canada with 27 men and 49 women who were members of dual-earner couples with children (McElwain, Korabik & Chappell, 2004). We found no gender-role orientation differences in WIF, which was not surprising considering that all participants were employed full time. Moreover, there were no significant main effects or interactions as a function of demographic gender. Interestingly, both men and women who were high in instrumentality had significantly lower levels of FIW than those low in instrumentality. However, a significant interaction was found, indicating that the effect of instrumentality on FIW varied as a function of expressivity. Regardless of their demographic gender, feminine individuals had the highest levels of FIW, followed by masculine and undifferentiated participants. Individuals who were androgynous (high in both instrumentality and expressivity) had the lowest levels of FIW. The high levels of FIW experienced by feminine individuals could be due to the high priority these men and women put on the family domain (Thompson, 2002). However, androgynous individuals are as high in expressivity as feminine individuals, so they would also be expected to be family-oriented. But, they would likely balance this by putting an equally high priority on the work domain. Moreover, high levels of conflict and distress are atypical of androgynous individuals who are usually able to adjust to, cope with, and perform successfully in, a wide variety of social situations (Bem, 1981).