Describe the five major social institutions that influence gender roles.
What will be an ideal response?
In each sphere of society, be it home, school, or work, forces are at work that shape gender roles and behaviors. These forces help to define gender roles, which may help make people competent members of their society.
Expectations of masculine and feminine behaviors begin in very early childhood. To understand how gender roles and stereotypes are learned the most important agents that socialize people-parents and caregivers, peers, school, the media, and religion are examined.
Parents and Caregivers: Parents and caregivers are the first to influence gender roles.
In some ways they may be the most significant influence until late childhood. They teach children the ways of society and how to behave in it. This is reflected in everything from the toys that children receive, to parental responses to their apparent masculinity or femininity, to the way that parents model their own gender roles for children.
Peers: Children are among the most powerful teachers of gender roles to each other.
Studies show that both the emotional and cognitive sides of peer group learning help the process of becoming a boy or becoming a girl along.
School: One function of school is to teach societal standards and institutional expectations, and gender roles are very powerful parts of such expected learning. Most studies show that, on average, girls do better in school than boys. Girls get higher grades and complete high school at a higher rate compared to boys.
The Media: Children early on begin to learn gender roles on television and the Internet.
Today, they grow up with a sense that these media are a natural extension of the self and imitate dress, makeup, behavioral and emotional expression, and games they see in the media.
Then they apply what they learn from these sources to interactions with family and peers.
Religion: Religion influences gender socialization, especially regarding attitudes about morality, masculinity/femininity, and sexual expression.
You might also like to view...
Estimates on the prevalence of transsexuality are most likely ____
a. underestimates, because most estimates come from surgeons, physicians, and psychologists, from whom transgendered people seek medical help in order to transition, and only a small percentage of transsexual people seek physical body changes b. overestimates, because the media sensationalizes transsexuality, when in fact only a small number of people are truly considered transsexual c. underestimates, because children who show signs of transsexuality are too young to be diagnosed as transsexual d. overestimates, because some professionals include transvestites in their definition of transsexual
Which of the following represents a true distinction between content bias and criterion validity bias?
a) Content bias is evaluated by comparing item difficulty to general ability, while criterion validity bias is evaluated by error in prediction. b) Content bias is evaluated at the test level, while predictive bias is evaluated at the item level. c) Content bias is evaluated by panels of expert judges, while predictive bias is evaluated by experimental evidence. d) Content bias is evaluated by regression analysis, while predictive bias is evaluated by panels of expert judges.
Evangelical Christians often promote sexual abstinence for young, unmarried Christians. An example of this can be found in
a. feminist theology b. liberation theology c. sexual purity movement d. none of these
Mariana and David want to practice a method of avoiding pregnancy that is 100 percent effective. What method would you recommend?
a) abstinence b) calendar method c) cervical mucus method d) condoms