Gender Roles

Concept of Gender Roles

The definition of gender roles derives from the concept of social role, which refers to the shared expectations that apply to people who occupy a certain social position or are members of a particular social category. At an individual level, roles are schemas, or abstract knowledge structures, pertaining to a group of people. To the extent that role schemas are shared among members of a society, they are important structures at the societal level as well as the individual level. Roles are thus aspects of social structure, which consists of persisting and bounded patterns of behavior and social interaction.

Social roles foster characteristic ways of behaving among people who have the same social position within a social structure or who are classified in the same general societal category (e.g., as men, as elderly). Encouragement to act in particular ways arises from the shared role schemas that people in a society hold. For example, people who have a particular occupational role (e.g., as an accountant or a plumber) are subjected to a set of expectations concerning the work they should do and the manner in which they should do it.

Gender roles apply to people in the extremely general social categories of male and female. These roles, like roles based on qualities such as age, social class, and race/ethnicity, have great scope because they apply to all aspects of people's daily lives. In contrast, more specific roles based on factors such as family relationships (e.g., father, daughter) and occupation (e.g., nurse, police officer) are mainly relevant to behavior in a particular social context—at work, for example, in the case of occupational roles. This general applicability of gender roles means that they influence behavior, even though specific roles simultaneously constrain behavior. For example, because gender roles are present in the workplace, people have somewhat different expectations for female and male occupants of the same workplace role.

On Stereotypes

The importance of gender roles is revealed in research on gender stereotypes, which documents the differing beliefs that people hold about the typical behaviors of women and men. The content of many of these beliefs can be summarized by [Page 301]differences on two dimensions, which are frequently labeled communal and agentic. Women, more than men, are thought to be communal—that is, friendly, unselfish, concerned with others, and emotionally expressive. Men, more than women, are thought to be agentic—that is, masterful, assertive, competitive, and instrumentally competent.

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