Question

Why does competition between genders roles, individualism, collectivism, and culture exist? I'm having a lot of problems explaining and understanding it.

Answer 1

There is no one-word answer to this question. The roots are going to history, culture, personality, geography, and maybe, automation in coming days.

Let's begin with the understanding of a few key terms.

Personality : Funder (1997) defined personality as “an individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms—hidden or not—behind those patterns” (pp. 1–2). Characteristic sampling of the information in the environment, which corresponds to the sampling that occurs in different cultures, can be one of the bases of individual differences in personality. Another way of discussing personality is that it is a configuration of cognitions, emotions, and habits which are activated when situations stimulate their expression. They generally determine the individual’s unique adjustment to the world.

Gender, Patriarchy, and Feminism : Gender refers to the different ways that men and women are culturally defined and evaluated. ‘Gender’, as a cultural, dynamic and variable construction, distinguishes from ‘Sex’, which is universal, static and invariable. The term ‘patriarchy’ referring to male dominance in certain social spheres, although women also contribute and exercise power in those social spheres. ‘Feminism’ will not be associated with man hating; it will be associated here with gender equality.

Culture: One way to think about culture is that “culture is to society what memory is to individuals” (Kluckhohn, 1954). It includes what “has worked” in the experience of a society that was worth transmitting to future generations. Language, time, and place are important in determining the difference between one and another culture (Triandis, 1994), since language is needed to transmit culture and it is desirable to have the same historical period and geography to do so efficiently. Sperber (1996) used the analogy of an epidemic. An idea (e.g., how to make a tool) that is useful is adopted by more and more people and becomes an element of culture. Elements of culture are shared standard operating procedures, unstated assumptions, tools, norms, values, habits about sampling the environment, and the like.

Individualism : In individualist societies people are autonomous and independent from their in-groups; they give priority to their personal goals over the goals of their in-groups, they behave primarily on the basis of their attitudes rather than the norms of their in-groups, and exchange
theory adequately predicts their social behavior

Collectivism: In collectivist cultures people are interdependent within their in-groups (family, tribe, nation, etc.), give priority to the goals of their in-groups, shape their behavior primarily on the basis of in-group norms, and behave in a communal way (Mills & Clark, 1982). People in collectivist cultures are especially concerned with relationships. For example, Ohbuchi, Fukushima, and Tedeschi (1999) showed that collectivists in conflict situations are primarily concerned with maintaining their relationship with others, whereas individualists are primarily concerned with achieving justice. Thus, collectivists prefer methods of conflict resolution that do not destroy relationships (e.g., mediation),whereas individualists are willing to go to court to settle disputes (Leung,1997).

Most societies have developed an elaborate and segregated network of roles for each sex, with little interaction or exchange between the two. The allocation of different spheres of responsibility to men and women has been a means of maintaining and reinforcing an imbalance of power between the sexes.

Individualism and collectivism are often equated with independent vs. interdependent, agentic vs.communal, and separate vs. relational self-construals. Although these same concepts have been used to characterize both cultural and gender differences, a perspective of cultural evolution suggests it is unlikely.

A division of labor within society may produce gender differences, but this cannot explain cultural differences.The differences between cultures are captured mostly by the extent to which people see themselves as acting as independent agents, whereas gender differences are best summarized by the extent to which people regard themselves as emotionally related to others.

Contemporary theorists have distinguished three, rather than two, dimensions of the self (Breckler & Greenwald, 1986; Greenwald & Breckler, 1985;Triandis, 1989). The first is the individualistic dimension of the self, captured by such concepts as independent, autonomous,agentic, and separate. Geertz (1974/1984) summarized this imageof the person as "a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background (p. 126)."

The other two dimensions can be best defined in contrast to this dominant conception. One contrast concerns the relationship between the individual and the collective, which we call a collective dimension of the self. As stated by Triandis (1989, p.509), individualists "give priority to personal goals over the goals of collectives; collectivists either make no distinctions between personal and collective goals, or if they do make such distinctions, they subordinate their personal goals to the collective goals". A similar view has been expressed by other theorists as well (e.g., Hofstede, 1980; Shweder & Bourne, 1982; Triandis,Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, & Lucca, 1988).

The other contrast has to do with the relationship between the individual and other individuals, that is, whether the self is construed to be related with other selves. Gilligan (1982) voiced her criticism that the separate self is predominantly a male perspective, whereas women's conception is one of self-in-relationship. Many theorists have echoed this view (e.g., Belenky,Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Chodorow, 1978; Miller, 1986). We will call this a relational dimension.

Although most theorists agree that women are more relational than men (e.g., Gilligan,1982; Miller, 1986), theorists disagree about cultural differences in self-construal. Triandis (1989) argued that individualistic, collective,and relational self-construals are present in peoples in all cultures, but differentially accessed in different cultural contexts,which are denned most notably by individualism and collectivism (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991; Hofstede, 1980). However, the nature of individualism and collectivism is unclear and open to debate (see Kim, Triandis, Kagitcibasi, Choi, & Yoon, 1994; Schwartz, 1990,1992). For instance, while Kagitcibasi (1990) and Hamaguchi (1977) have characterized this dimension in relational terms, Hofstede (1980) and Triandis et al. (1988) emphasized the individualistic and collective dimensions of the self.

From a cultural evolutionary perspective (e.g., Sahlins & Service,1960), cultural and gender differences are unlikely to be characterized by the same dimensions of the self. According to this view, symbolic culture develops in part as a means of adaptation to the social and natural environment. It is conceivable that gender-related social roles emerge as constellations of behaviors that are differentially desirable for men and women due to a gender-based division of labor (e.g., Eagly, 1987). In many traditional societies, men's primary task is to obtain the means of sustenance, whereas women's is to raise the offspring. By contrast, cultural differences are unlikely to stem from such a division of labor between cultures and may reflect different peoples' attempts to adjust to different ecological systems (e.g., Berry, 1979; Triandis, 1972; Whiting, 1964). Although cultures of industrialized societies are unlikely to be easily swayed by the current ecological environment, they are likely to have kept some significant elements from the more traditional past. To put it succinctly, a gender difference has emerged within a particular ecosystem, whereas a cultural difference has emerged between different ecosystems.

It is instructive to be reminded of Geertz's description of the Western conception of the person. A "bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole" (Geertz, 1974/1984, p. 126) is the dominant conception of the person in the West, including the United States and Australia. However, this is not the only person type that is available in the West. There is the other type, which can be characterized by such adjectives as collectivist, interdependent, ensembled, communal, and relational. It appears that depending on a particular intergroup context, the dominant person type was attributed to either men or Westerners; women and East Asians were both relegated to the "other" person type. The contrasting person types that the theorists have relied on in characterizing cultural and gender differences may be themselves a reflection of cultural models of the person (Quinn & Holland, 1987). Perhaps one way to combat such tendencies is to bring different cultural perspectives on the enquiry of self-processes.