Gender and Sexuality

2107 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The impacts of the gender stereotype

Males and females are classed differently from the moment they are pronounced boy or girl. Gender determines the differences in power and control in which men and women have over the socioeconomic determinants of their health, lives and status in their community. Our society moulds how men and women should and should not behave and can be observed in all parts of our society. As a result of these Gender stereotypes men and women have issues which affect their health which are unique to each gender. Males for example are perceived to be greater risk takers as a whole in our society than that of females. We represent risk taking behavior with masculinity and violence, high speed driving and contact sport with the male gender. (Doyle 2005)

From the time a male first starts to walk many parents will give him toys which promote violence, they will sign their young boys up for rugby league and buy them the computer games which are based on violent behavior. This perception that the male gender needs to exuberate this type of conduct is a large part due to the society we live in and how males are perceived. Women however due to their lighter frames and child bearing needs are deemed to be more delicate and sensitive then that of the male gender and are suited to more subtle and less aggressive games and often play with dolls as children, are not taught to stand up for themselves and are enrolled in sports such as netball and dancing.

Traditionally we have lived in a patriarchal society, in which males were assumed to be the breadwinners of the family to hold down a job and support the household. Women have been characterized as the housewife whom takes care of the family and looks after her husband. This is known as the division of labor, males were seen as the dominant sex purely because they contributed to the family?s material well being of the family more than that of the female.(Brettall & Sargent 2004) Only in recent times has this theory started to change with many women now in the workforce. Males still however dominate the participation rates in the workforce as well as occupying the majority of highly placed positions. In 1996 women in the workforce was calculated at 54% whilst males were 74% still a twenty percent difference but a big change from the 48 percent difference in a 1966 poll. (Zadoroznyj, M)

This change in the workforce with now many w...

... middle of paper ...

...les. Many problems are biologically based yet there are many health issues which are due to the social construction of gender in our society.

References:

Brettell and Sargent. "Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective" Prentice Hall; 4 edition (August 12, 2004)

Burck and Speed. (2005) Gender, Power and relationships. London and New York. Routledge.

Garrett, Stephanie. (1992) "Gender (Society Now)" Routledge

Kessler and McKenna. (2008) Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach,. Chicago and London. The University of Chicago Press.

Doyle, J. (2005) Sex and Gender: The Human experience. Iowa. Wm. C. Brown Publishers.

Wainrib, B. (1992) Gender Issues Across the Life Cycle. New York. Sprinder Publishing Company Inc.

WHO "Unequal, Unfair, Ineffective and Inefficient Gender Inequity in Health: Why it exists and how we can change it" World Health Organization. 2007 Web.

http://www.who.int/social_determinants/resources/csdh_media/wgekn_final_report_07.pdf

Zadoroznyj, Maria. (1999) "Social Class, Social Selves and Social Control in Childbirth." Blackwell Publishers Ltd/Editorial Board. Web.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9566.00156/pdf

Show More
Related

  • The Deception of Trifles: Gender Roles in the Play by Glaspell

    1559 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of What It Means To Be Gendered Me

    944 Words  | 2 Pages

    Betsy Lucal, "What it means to be gendered me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System."

    Read More

  • Trifling Justice

    1534 Words  | 4 Pages

    Social gender separations are displayed in the manner that men the view Wright house, where Mr. Wright has been found strangled, as a crime scene, while the women who accompany them clearly view the house as Mrs. Wright’s home. From the beginning the men and the women have are there for two separate reasons —the men, to fulfill their duties as law officials, the women, to prepare some personal items to take to the imprisoned Mrs. Wright. Glaspell exposes the men’s superior attitudes, in that they cannot fathom women to making a contribution to the investigation. They leave them unattended in a crime scene. One must question if this would be the same action if they were men. The county attorney dismisses Mrs. Hale’s defenses of Minnie as “l...

    Read More

  • Power In Trifles

    2135 Words  | 5 Pages

    The power of women is different than that of men. Women display a subtle and indirect kind of power, but can be resilient enough to impact the outside world. In Trifles, Susan Glaspell delivers the idea that gender and authority are chauvinistic issues that confirm male characters as the power holders, while the female characters are less significant and often weak. This insignificance and weakness indicated in the play by the fact that the women had the evidence to solve a murder, but the men just ignored the women as if they had no value to the case at all. This weakness and inability of the female to contest the man’s view are apparent. According to Ben-Zvi, “Women who kill evoke fear because they challenge societal constructs of femininity-passivity, restraint, and nurture; thus the rush to isolate and label the female offender, to cauterize the act” (141). This play presents women against men, Ms. Wright against her husband, the two women against their spouses and the other men. The male characters are logical, arrogant, and stupid while the women are sympathetic, loyal, and drawn to empathize with Mrs. Wright and forgive her crime. The play questions the extent to which one should maintain loyalty to others. Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale try to withhold incriminating evidence against Mrs. Wright, and by challenging the reader to question whether

    Read More

  • Learning Gender In a Diverse Society

    999 Words  | 2 Pages

    This article was written to bring attention to the way men and women act because of how they were thought to think of themselves. Shaw and Lee explain how biology determines what sex a person is but a persons cultures determines how that person should act according to their gender(Shaw, Lee 124). The article brings up the point that, “a persons gender is something that a person performs daily, it is what we do rather than what we have” (Shaw, Lee 126). They ...

    Read More

  • Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: An Analysis

    473 Words  | 1 Pages

    In fact, the graphic novel opens with Marjane professing the fact that she and her friends did not understand the meaning of the veil newly imposed by the Islamic Republic; they only knew it as a change from the time before, when they did not need to cover their hair. This alerts us to the fact that for a child born into this new rule, the rule will seem perfectly normal, just as not wearing a veil felt normal for Marjane before the Revolution. Children, to such a degree, take their cues about what is normal in the world from the adults around them, and Marjane and her friends throughout Persepolis emulate in reality or imagination the roles of soldiers, torturers, demonstrators, prophets, heroes, and political leaders. Rather than thinking rationally or sophisticatedly about all the different players in this societal moment of crisis, Marjane at first follows or reveres anyone with power and popular

    Read More

  • The Department Of Homeland Security

    1275 Words  | 3 Pages

    After the tragedies of 9/11 and even hurricane Katrina, the nation was stunned at how a superpower such as the United States could experience such traumatic tragedies and not have been prepared to handle, protect or efficiently assist its citizens. The question after 9/11 was how do we prevent this tragedy from occurring again? How can the country be more prepared? These thoughts gave way to the early formulation of the risk assessment in 2001 that initially associated risk directly proportional to the population of an area. This formula later turned out to be an ineffective method. As the Department of Homeland Security was created and its mission expanded from not only counterterrorism, but to include non-terrorism threats such as natural or man-made disasters...

    Read More

  • Gender Inequality and Feminism in Susan Glaspell's Trifles

    1109 Words  | 3 Pages

    In several instances throughout the plot, men mentally and emotionally abuse the women by considering their jobs simply as trifles and unimportant. Ironically, the women accomplish something more significant than the men ever will by discovering actual proof that could result in the arrest of Mrs. Wright. In another instance. Mrs. Wright was so dramatically emotionally abused by her husband, it culminated in her murdering him and without any remorse. The severity of this abuse arises from the social issue of gender inequality in the early twentieth century. Finally, both Mrs. Hale and Mrs Peters mutually decide to withhold the evidence from the men in order to preserve Mrs. Wright’s innocence. This action contributes to the empowerment of women and the upbringing of the feminist movement Susan Gladspell hoped to

    Read More

  • Gender Femininity And Masculinity

    1477 Words  | 3 Pages

    All around the world society has created an ideological perspective for the basis of gender roles. Gender and sex are often times misused and believed to be interchangeable. This is not the case. There are two broad generalization of sexes; female and male, yet there is a vast number of gender roles that each sex should more or less abide by. The routinely cycle of socially acceptable behaviors and practices is what forms the framework of femininity and masculinity. The assigned sex categories given at birth have little to do with the roles that a person takes on. Biological differences within females and males should not be used to construe stereotypes or discriminate within different groups. Social variables such as playing with dolls or

    Read More

  • 'The Five Sexes And' The Five Sexes, Revisited?

    1070 Words  | 3 Pages

    Much of society is based on, and influenced by, the ideas of sex and gender. While the two are dissimilar in many ways, they are often thought of as interchangeable and are in a way connected. While gender is the biological makeup of one’s physical body, including chromosomes, hormones, gonads, genitals, and a variety of secondary characteristics, such as facial hair or breasts, gender is a socially constructed concept that influences social roles and behavior. However, one must ask how society can function properly, when a factor which influences social structures so heavily is inaccurately represented.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles In Mental Health

    1659 Words  | 4 Pages

    From a biological standpoint, men and women are defined purely based on the presence of a Y chromosome and certain bodily structures. Throughout history though, cultural and societal beliefs have cultivated an additional ever-changing definition on what it means to be male or female, which very much stretches beyond the biological perspective. This separate definition has led to the formation of gender roles that are essentially societal expectations for how a man or woman should behave. While there is little evidence supporting the notion that being born a particular sex puts one at greater risk of ill mental health, several studies have been conducted, concluding that gender roles have a much greater hand in one developing mental illness,

    Read More

  • Gender and Sexuality

    1230 Words  | 3 Pages

    Gender has been around throughout history; however, within recent years, gender has separated itself from the traditional view of sex, e.i., male or female, and has become centered on ones masculinity or femininity. Of course gender is more than just ones masculinity or femininity, gender has become a way for one to describe, he or she, in a way in which they are different from everyone else. Gender has turned into a sense of identity, a way for one to feel different and fulfilled among all of those around them. Of course gender’s sense of freedom would seem outside of structure and only affected by one’s own agency, however, structure is a key component in establishing gender. We can look into both ethnic Mexican’s culture practices regarding sexuality, children songs and games, and see that cultural traditions still heavily influence gender, creating what is masculine and what is feminine and what is the role of each gender, as well as challenging the notions that gender is solely based on agency.

    Read More

  • Gender Inequality at a Workplace

    1117 Words  | 3 Pages

    Historically, males and females normally assume different kinds of jobs with varying wages in the workplace. These apparent disparities are widely recognized and experienced across the globe, and the most general justification for these differences is that they are the direct outcomes of discrimination or traditional gender beliefs—that women are the caregivers and men are the earners. However, at the turn of the new century women have revolutionized their roles in the labor market. Specifically in industrialized societies, the social and economic position of women has shifted. Despite of the improving participation of women in the labor force and their ameliorating proficiency and qualifications, the labor force is still not so favorable to women. The opportunities available for women in the market are not as diverse as those presented to men. Still, the construct of gender ideology influences how employers undertake economic decisions, and that is why companies still have jobs labelled as “men’s work” and occupations categorized as “women’s work.” Indeed, the pervasiveness of gender differences in labor markets is undeniably true, specifically with respect to salary gap between men and women, occupational gender segregation of men and women, and the challenge that women face in terms of juggling their time and attention between their career and family life.

    Read More

  • Gender and Sexuality

    2683 Words  | 6 Pages

    Gender and sexuality can be comprehended through social science. Social science is “the study of human society and of individual relationships in and to society” (free dictionary, 2009). The study of social science deals with different aspects of society such as politics, economics, and the social aspects of society. Gender identity is closely interlinked with social science as it is based on an identity of an individual in the society. Sexuality is “the condition of being characterized and distinguished by sex” (free dictionary, 2009). There are different gender identities such as male, female, gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual that exists all around the world. There is inequality in gender identities and dominance of a male regardless of which sexuality they fall under. The males are superior over the females and gays superior over the lesbians, however it different depending on the place and circumstances. This paper will look at the gender roles and stereotypes, social policy, and homosexuality from a modern and a traditional society perspective. The three different areas will be compared by the two different societies to understand how much changes has occurred and whether or not anything has really changed. In general a traditional society is more conservative where as a modern society is fundamentally liberal. This is to say that a traditional society lists certain roles depending on the gender and there are stereotypes that are connected with the genders. One must obey the one that is dominant and make decisions. On the other hand, a modern society is lenient, It accepts the individual’s identity and sexuality. There is no inequality and everyone in the society is to be seen as individuals not a part of a family unit...

    Read More

  • Single Parenting Theory

    1090 Words  | 3 Pages

    Satz, Debra. "Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family."Stanford University. Stanford University, 6 Nov. 2004. Web. 25 Sept. 2015.

    Read More

More about Gender and Sexuality

Open Document