Gender Role Theory

Margaret Mead's Early Research

Margaret Mead's 1935 book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, was particularly instrumental in challenging biological explanations for gendered differences. She identified dramatically different gender roles in the three cultures she investigated: The Arapesh required both males and females to be nurturing, cooperative, and peaceful; the Mundugumor demanded that both females and males be aggressive and violent; and the Tchambuli expected females to be dominant and impersonal, but males to be emotionally dependent and concerned with personal adornment. Mead argued that the patterns she observed clearly demonstrated that many gendered differences are not biologically determined but are socially constructed by societal preferences—preferences that could and did vary and that represented only a small fraction of the wide range of human temperaments and skills. Since Mead's investigations, many scholars have used gender roles to predict and explain the behavior of males and females.

Alice Eagly's Gender Role Theory

Alice Eagly is arguably one of the most prolific scholars using gender role theory to explicate the behavior of males and females. Among Eagly's extensive publications, her 1987 book, Sex-Differences in Social Behaviors: A Social-Role Interpretation, is probably cited the most often as the fullest treatment of her theoretical perspective. Eagly maintained that a community's gender roles are known to its members and that members agree and comply with and reinforce these standards. Various strategies can be used to identify gender roles in a given society, including gendered stereotypes and descriptions of the “ideal” male or female. Certain types of slang also signal such roles and associated judgments about appropriateness (e.g., Don Juan, slut, bachelor, spinster, sissy, tomboy, stallion, chick). Community standards for ideal behaviors for males and females are likely to be reinforced by members of the community in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways (e.g., smile/frown, conversational extensions/topic shifts, agreements/disagreements, inclusion/exclusion, praise/criticism, support/harassment, advancement/stagnation). Gendered expectations can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, with people enacting what others expect of them.

In taking a structural approach to gender differences, Eagly reasoned that because males and females are expected to fulfill divergent roles within social structures, they behave differently and are evaluated differently. More specifically, she noted that women are expected to fulfill communal roles that require one to be selfless, caring, and nurturing, while men are expected to enact agentic roles entailing independence, task orientation, and dominance. According to Eagly, these expectations lead to divisions of labor related to these roles in the workplace—with males occupying more of the high-status positions—and in the home, where women assume more of the domestic responsibilities. Further, occupying distinctive roles is likely to influence the acquisition and reinforcement of different skills and attitudes (e.g., opinions about force and compassion). Gender role theory predicts that the greater the difference in social roles performed by males and females, the greater the difference in behaviors and attitudes; conversely, the more they perform the same social roles, the more similar their behavior and attitudes. The theory predicts that gendered behavior will change when gender roles change.

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