Gender and Society in Our Culture Today

As we learned in chapter 13 gender roles play a key part in different cultures. The gender roles also affect how we socialize with one another. The definition of gender roles (also know as sex roles) are attitudes and activities that a society links to each sex. I feel like the gender roles are slowly changing and becoming more relaxed. The gender roles used to be very defined. The women were expected to stay at home and take care of the kids while the men were expected to support his family. Men were also a lot more likely to go to school then women were again because since women were expected to stay home there was no need for women to get an education. Women used to not be able to play sports because they were expected to be lady like and very proper and playing sports was not proper or lady like.

Now gender roles are blending together. Women and men both attend school and women now have jobs and support their family just as much as men do. Men are now becoming stay at home dads that are the ones who stay home and take care of the kids. There are still problems with the gender roles because women are still looked down upon by society if they get a job. Women are generally still paid less then men. Men who are stay are home dads are looked down at. Society still has expected gender roles set from the previous generation of society. I feel like as more of our generation of society gets into positions of power this stigma with gender roles will seriously decrease. Now women play sports as much as men do. There are still gender segregated teams but I think that has more to do with trying to be fair then because there is a specific gender role attached to it.


Mass media plays a huge role in continuing the gender roles. Women are portrayed as having to have very skinny bodies in order to be considered "beautiful". Women in movies are still cast in roles that have passive "weak" females that need active aggressive males. Males don't have the pressure to look a certain way in order to be considered attractive. The media creates a big double standard in society that perpetuates the gender roles in society. I do feel like there is a counter movement starting to take hold to combat this double standard. Men are being held more accountable for how they look and act and women are being held less accountable. I feel like this movement is just trying to even out the standards for both men and women in society and how each gender is viewed in the mass media

https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/gender-and-sexuality-15/introduction-to-gender-and-sexuality-75/gender-roles-and-differences-296-12831/

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-097.pdf