Sex Role Stereotypes and Gender Differences

Overview

Does gender matter? It certainly does if you are a Pakistani female and decide to take a job as a member of the police force in the northwestern region of your country. Under those circumstances, those who think women should not be on the police force will cut your life short and kill your children and the rest of your family just to get their message across.

Does gender matter in education? It matters in varying degrees, depending on the social context. It mattered greatly if you were a girl living in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan a decade ago. Then, you simply did not get any education because schools that you previously attended were all closed, and attempts to override these laws often had drastic consequences. Though not as draconian, the United States and other Western cultures are not impervious to the damaging consequences of stereotyping. Because fewer females go on to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the so-called STEM professions), we continue to have a gender gap in those fields, which affects both female earning power and the economy itself (as we will demonstrate in a later section).

Although many factors contribute to this gender gap within our own society, one of the more interesting may be the pervasive sexualization of young females, a phenomenon recently reported by the American Psychological Association's Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. This report found that such sexualization was extremely broad, and occurred across a wide variety of domains such as the toy industry and the media. The consequences included lowered self-esteem, overemphasis on receiving attention from male peers, and decreased interest in academic achievement. This societal backdrop may partially account for why fewer girls choose to pursue study in fields such as math and science that they fear will make them less attractive to boys.

As demonstrated by these examples, the importance of gender varies as a function of location, [Page 1949]history, and culture. Although its effects are less dramatic within the United States in the first part of the 21st century, it is probably correct to assume that gender is never unimportant and should not be overlooked in discussions of pedagogy.

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