Gender Identity Essay

Gender roles are not the product of innate biology; They are formed based on the cultural and societal beliefs that surround an individual during their development. These factors play a very important role in gender identity, and often lead individuals to believe in stereotypical representations of gender identity such as gender roles. The way in which these cultures interpret the expression of gender identity heavily impacts the way an individual chooses to express themselves. You are as others see you, yet others do not always see you as you are. With the importance others play on the sense of identity, it's no wonder that peers influence the minds of individuals early on in life. As young toddlers, children do not recognize biological

Although, there is proof of cognitive and mental variations in the way that two genders process information. For example, women are shown to be more adept at verbal communication and comprehension while men tend to perform better in the visual-spatial category. On the topic of memory, studies show that women are more sensory and memory oriented. In one study at the University of Edinburgh, psychologist Stuart Ritchie and a team of researchers compared data from many different male and female subjects. As Micheal Price states, “Adjusting for age, on average, they found that women tended to have significantly thicker cortices than men. Thicker cortices have been associated with higher scores on a variety of cognitive and general intelligence tests. Meanwhile, men had higher brain volumes than women in every subcortical region they looked at, including the hippocampus (which plays broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, and decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition, and reward-processing), and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).” (Price 2017). So indeed there are differences, however the similarities between genders far outweigh the differences. McGraw-Hill Higher Education argues that “More equivocal are gender differences in activity level, dependency, timidity, exploratory activity, and vulnerability to stress. There are no gender differences in sociability, conformity, achievement, self-esteem, or verbal hostility (Child Psychology).” In turn proving many once believed facts such as “women and men communicate differently, it's biology” into preconceived