Gender Roles And Stereotypes From Mead's Work (Essay Sample)

Name
Institution
Lecturer
Date
Gender roles and stereotypes
Introduction
From a young age, the society dictates to people on what they should look like and act like based on their gender. The preset begins at an early age where girls are generally expected to love pink or pastel colors and boys blue or dark colors. It goes further to establish careers that should be pursued by the females and different ones for the males. An example, ladies are more fit in the nursing careers while men are fit to be doctors. Moms should stay at home, cook, clean and take care of the children while dads go out to work and earn money to sustain the family. These kind of roles are the ones we refer to as gender roles as they outline ideas and duties that one should conform to and accept without any question (Basow 1992). This paper will focus on gender roles and gender temperaments with the first part focusing on negative impacts of rigid gender roles and temperament, the second part on potential loss of values if gender roles and temperaments are abolished and the last part on changes in everyday life as a result of the gender roles
Negative effects of rigid gender roles and gender temperament
Gender roles operate on a principle that certain personality traits are attributed to a given gender. From the societies we come from women are expected to submit to men while men are assertive and aggressive. Women are allowed to be emotional and express their feelings, unlike men who are taught to suppress their emotions. The outcome of this is forcing people to change who they really are and shame them if they don’t. This creates internal conflicts unhappiness and dissatisfaction within people who feel they are not being accepted as they are in the society. Suppressing of emotion, in turn, causes anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Accepting the gender stereotype that men are aggressive leads to acceptance of abuse in relationships as something normal.
Gender roles and stereotypes affect people’s career choices. Jobs that require caring, comforting and serving behaviors are labeled for the women and generally have low male level employment (Lindsey 2015). Such jobs include nursing, flight attendants, and secretaries. Jobs requiring toughness strength and masculinity like engineering, police officers and doctors are meant for men. Boys are believed to be better in scientific and mathematical skills and are advised to pursue careers in that line while girls are believed do better in languages and humanities.
Duties and responsibilities in a family setting are affected by the gender stereotyping. Father being the head of the family is supposed to work and provide for the family while the mother stays at home, does the cooking and raise the children. Mothers have less of a choice and perform these duties even though they are unhappy about it. Stay at home husbands are considered to be unmanly for not going out to work and perform their manly duty.
Potential loss of social values from abolishing gender roles and temperaments
Gender roles are important in the society. Without them, we would live in a chaotic world full of confusion. We have advanced from times when women didn’t work or attend school, but still there roles that men and women need to fulfill and can’t run away from. Let’s take motherhood for women, women cannot neglect their duty of taking care of children, household having dinners made. It’s not a man’s duty to cook and wash, men are expected to go out and provide food and other necessities for their families
Gender roles establish our identity. We are all born with a specific purpose. Being male or female come with unique roles and responsibilities. Both men and women have responsibilities that only men can do and the same is true for the women. Abolishing of the gender roles would leave us in a chaos not knowing what to do, how to behave or what our responsibility is
Personalities are born from gender roles. They teach us lessons and without them, we would not be able to clearly establish who we are. We would be frazzled not knowing where our place is or even the people we would love to spend the rest of our lives with. Without the gender roles in the society, people would have no direction on where go and what to do
Both women and men have the ability to achieve most of the tasks irrespective of the gender. However, a big number of women are naturally born being emotional, caring and with a domestic orientation. Men, on the other hand, are excellent providers and protectors. It’s true that you need not necessarily conform to this pattern, but this has been the role structure for quite a long time. It’s natural and that’s how it’s simply supposed to be. Interfering with this ideology would mean an interference of the whole societal set up on values that have been built for such a long time
The whole human life is built and determined by the gender roles (Haines 360). Men and women are simply and plainly different, that’s for a fact and thus it is important we have these roles. They are a number of things that women can do better than men and the opposite is true. Let’s take an example of childbirth, its role that only women can perform and it’s not changing. Men are more masculine biologically making them fit for more manual labor as opposed to women. There are facts we can’t change and gen...