In: Psychology
To what extent is gender a product of society, and how does society create gendered individuals?
Gender are often centred around the conceptions of femininity or masculinity. In our society today, women are socialized as being the care takers of the house, who take care the children, cook and clean. With men, they "should" be the workhorse, they provide, protect, a leader, and a teacher to his family. Empirical investigations suggest that gender roles are "social constructs that vary significantly across time, context, and culture".The social construction of gender is a notion in feminism and sociology about the operation of gender and gender differences in societies. Some supporters of this idea argue that the differences in behavior between men and women are entirely social conventions. According to this view, society and culture create gender roles, and these roles are prescribed as ideal or appropriate behavior for a person of that specific sex. Social constructionism focuses on how meaning is created. Emerging from the criticism of objectivity, social constructionism challenges concepts of knowledge put forward by positivism, which postulates the externality of reality and that empirically-proved truths are mind-independent. A study by Bandura shows that kids want to be like others of their sex. Social conformity has been widely studied on adolescents. Results showed that 6-year-old children tend to conform to choices that their peers find more popular. They begin identifying objects as, girl or boy. Gender is accomplished through an active process of creating gender through interacting with others in a particular social context.
Conclusion------- There are different perspectives: attachment theory, social constructionist and feminist contributions to systemic and analytic thinking. Despite areas of commonality there are numerous difficulties in bringing together such divergent paradigms, such as the incongruities in language and their modernist or postmodernist assumptions.