How Socialization Shapes Gender Roles

Chapter three of the book talks about socialization and the social construction of gender. The author digs deeper into discussing how gender has been viewed in the past and how that has affected the current views on gender. From the discussions, it can be seen that men have always been viewed as the superior being and this affected the roles assigned to them. Men were considered physically stronger, braver and were tasked handy work. Women on the other hand were viewed as delicate, weak and were often assigned less involving tasks. This scenario has however changed in the current world where men and women are viewed as equals and thus exposed to the same benefits and privileges such as education and career advancement. The author links discussions on essentialism and how this has changed over the years. He links the ideas with chapter two which holds discussions on the historical evolution of gender. In the new age, the idea of labeling gender as men and women is debatable considering people who are born with ambiguously sexed bodies or those who are born of one sex but envision their bodies to be of the opposite sex. The author categorizes how the society views human beings on terms of sex, sex category and gender. These categories are often used to determine a person’s gender roles in the society. It is always assumed that a person wearing a suit and a tie is male, whereas a person wearing a dress is female. However, in the current world where there is freedom of expression, many of these things have changed. Clothing, hairstyles and body language have become more unisex making it more difficult to categorize people in the society based on this. Finally, the chapter links the first two chapters and from this, one can conclude that; a person acquires gender roles through gender socialization, gender roles are sustained through social expectations accountability and gender categorization and gender roles are shaped by possibilities and constraints at institutional and structural levels.