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Gender Roles in Relationships

Gender roles are sex-specific, reciprocal claims and obligations. Because women and men move in many contexts and kinds of relationships, they occupy many roles. Understanding how gender roles shape behavior in relationships involves distinguishing between sex—biological differences between males and females—and gender—the cultural distinctions that people draw between masculinity and femininity. Gender is not a biological given, but is what people collectively agree that sex attributes mean. Men and women are expected to perform in ways consistent with these cultural ideals, and gender is taught and rehearsed daily throughout life. Though people may not always live up to the obligations specified by (or implicit in) gender roles, accountability to those ideals shapes behavior nonetheless.

Gender roles are sets of connected behaviors that are expected of men and women in specific contexts (such as family homes or public places of work). These expectations are upheld by ideologies (collective systems of beliefs about right and wrong) that legitimate these roles. For instance, many Western societies assign women most care work within family homes (gender role), on the shared understanding that they are more nurturing by nature (ideology). People give little girls dolls and boys trucks; girls and boys then develop different skills appropriate for jobs of different status, which people take as signs of natural differences, thereby justifying their gender roles within families. These gender roles are associated, in turn, with relative advantages and disadvantages. For example, men's abilities to work for pay relatively unfettered by family care allow them to acquire greater status and wealth; women's positions and well-being are thus often dependent upon men's. In this sense, men's privileges are intimately tied to women's disadvantages, and none of this depends on individuals' intentions. People reproduce gender inequality without necessarily meaning to do so.

Drawing on this understanding of gender and institutional contexts, this entry explores gender roles within three common relationships: romantic, family, and friendships.

Romantic Relationships

Women's roles typically involve labor performed in the service of others, including care work and attending to the emotions of others. Researchers find that women prioritize the sexual and other needs of male dates more than vice versa, a finding that dovetails with research on communicative exchange that documents men's conversational dominance and women's greater deference. Further, men are more likely to decode women's nonverbal cues as being sexual in nature and to interpret women's friendliness as sexual interest.

Men, more than women, use physical attractiveness to select dating partners. Although traditional roles specify that men initiate dates, research indicates that, at least in Western society, women are more likely to ask men out than in the past and are more likely to want to share the expenses of the date. Studies also show that men are more likely to view these women as more sexually interested than women who follow traditional dating protocols.

Whereas research suggests that men and women hold certain different attitudes and beliefs about romantic relationships, such differences are often exaggerated in the popular press and do not hold across cultures. Thus, research comparing men and women in the United States and China finds that culture explained more variation in beliefs about love and romantic relationships than did gender. And within the United States, race, ethnicity, and class differences are often as predictive of differences as is gender. That said, within the United States, most recent studies on romantic ideology find little or no gender differences. Large numbers of both men and women are likely to insist that love be the basis for marriage; not quite as high a proportion believe love is necessary for marriage maintenance. Despite these similarities, compared with women, men are more likely to say that they would be willing to marry without love, and they are less likely to view emotional satisfaction as important to marriage maintenance.

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