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Socially Constructed Gender Roles

What does it mean to be a girl or a boy? Why do I think this way?

By Vanessa SolorzanoPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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Once when I was 6 years old, I recall a day when my brother and I were playing with our toys while we waited for our mom to finish preparing dinner. My brother was playing with his toy cars and I was playing with my baby dolls. We decided to play with our toys together so I put one of my baby dolls in his toy monster truck and we took turns pushing it around. My brother decided to take the baby doll out of the monster truck toy to put it into another car. However, as soon as my brother picked up the doll, my mom had just walked in the room to check on us. She noticed that my brother was holding the baby doll and exclaimed how cute he looked holding it. This caught the attention of my dad who, unlike my mom, was not amused. My dad snatched the doll from him, “Babies are for girls! You’re a man son so you play with boy toys...Here.” he said sternly as he handed him a G.I. Joe action figure. As a 6 year old girl, I was very confused. I had seen my father hold my brother as a baby and feed him and care for him and show him affection, so why then were “babies for girls” only? This is just one example of how I was exposed to situations in which I was told that one had to be a certain gender in order to do certain things or act a certain way. In this essay I’m going to share with you the concept of the social construction of gender and how this applied to my life growing up, shaping me to be who I am today.

According to Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives by Gwen Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey, social constructionism can be defined as “The view that concepts that appear to be immutable, often solely biological, such as gender, race, and sexual orientation, are defined by human beings and can vary, depending on cultural and historical contexts”. When we think of this concept and apply it specifically to gender, we may ask ourselves, is one’s gender something that is out of our control or is it something that we have created. In order to answer this question I start by asking myself what being a girl means to me and why I think this way.

This question of course varies from woman to woman. Many factors can play a part in why that particular person feels the way they do about what it means to be a girl. For example, a group of anthropologists completed a study on three different cultures in New Guinea, in which they compared the variety of gender roles that each culture practiced. The study resulted in a vast array of mixed variations of the definition of femininity and masculinity, contradicting any predictions of biologists who follows the belief that gender is biologically predetermined. According to one of the lead anthropologists of the study, Margaret Mead, sex differences, at the core, are not “deeply biological” but instead learned and then carried on as common belief throughout that particular society (Kimmel, Spanning the World: Culture Constructs Gender Difference, pg. 59).

For me, I was taught that being a girl meant sitting “like a lady”, wearing girly colors such as pink and purple, having to be extra cautious when out at a late hour, only playing with the “girl toys”... and the list goes on and on. As a child, I hardly ever stopped to question these things. They were so commonplace in the environment that I grew up in, therefore I just accepted them as how it was supposed to be. It wasn’t until the day that my dad had told my brother that he couldn’t play with a baby doll because it was a “girl toy” that I had came the closest I would ever come, as a child, to questioning the reasoning behind our society’s gender roles. Now as an adult, I see myself as someone who, for the most part, follows the popular stereotypical gender roles associated with our society. I am a heterosexual girly-girl who enjoys wearing makeup, shopping and cooking. There is both a positive and negative side to this. I do not have the issue of feeling socially unaccepted and people seem to accept my personality as it typically matches their expectations. As for negatives, I am subject to the many gender inequalities all women face in our society, such as not receiving equal pay in the workplace and being subject to the higher risk of being a victim of acts of sexual violence. Whether or not my personality traits and interests would be different if I were raised in an environment that encouraged different gender roles, is something I have contemplated deeply.

Although I follow the stereotypical gender roles that are commonplace in our society, I have many friends who do not. I have a few female friends who are gay or lesbian, wear typically “masculine” clothing, and even friends who fully engage in “masculine” activities such as playing football or fishing. These girls weren’t brought up to be that way. Most of these girls struggled with their identity, living in a world where they felt socially unaccepted. However, despite the contradictions to our society’s image of how a woman should be, my friends were happiest being the person they wanted to be. Knowing this makes me believe that no matter which gender I was born into, my love for makeup, cooking, and shopping would still be unchanged.

I believe that gender is socially constructed and varies from one society to the next and changes over time. It is constructed through people’s interactions with each other and larger social institutions in their day to day life(notes). It is likely that there are certain aspects of my personality that would be different if I were born of the opposite gender. However, I do not think they would be major in any way. Despite this, for the most part, personally I coincidentally accommodate with most of the stereotypical roles assigned to my gender by the society with which I live in

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