Gender socialization is important to our society as it affect the behaviors of men and women which lead to gender differences. However, I believe there are some gender differences that cannot be explained by gender socialization. The key terms of gender socialization will be defined first, the relationships between gender socialization and gender differences will then be discussed.
Understand the key terms of gender socialization
The following terms have to be defined in order to understand gender socialization. First we have to distinguish the different between sex and gender. Sex means the biological and physiological differences between men and women, while gender consists of the socially constructed roles, behaviors, …show more content…
The first socialization agent that faced by a baby is their home and the people in the home. Parents are often the most significate one that affect the children as children learn sex-typed behaviors by recognizing with the parents of the same sex (Suar and Gochhayat, 2014). In many studies, we found that parents always have different attitude towards sons and daughters (Howell-Martinez, 1982). As mentioned before, parents will provide different toys, clothes and cartoons to boys and girls. More than that, parents may give different education to their children with different gander. They may teach the boy to be brave and should no cry easily while girls should be delicate. They learn to do the same thing of the parent having the same sex as they want to receive rewards and avoid punishments (Suar and Gochhayat, …show more content…
Chen and Rao (2010) find that children are influenced much by the gendered daily routines in the kindergarten. One of the example in this article is about the parallel lines on the classroom floor using blue- and red-colored electric wire tape were used for gender segregation. Boy have to line up along the blue line while girls have to line up along the red one. In the stereotype thinking of gender, blue represents boy and red represent girl. So the children will learn about which colors represent which gender based on the gender socialization. What is more, teacher in the school always use ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ to call the children and it is also a way to reinforce the gender socialization (Chen and Rao, 2010).
Other than family and school, media is also a gender socialization agent. On the screen, women often have the ‘feminine’ occupations or act as the poor that waiting for a men to save her. Therefore, we also found that male characters always act the strong and independent role which are similar to the characteristic that we assume men to be (Fung & Ma, 2000). So people may learn to be like the movie actors after watching a movie as they believe it is the expectation for the society to their gender.
Gender socialization is important to us as it explains the different behavior of the two gender. By studying this topic,