Gender Role Ideology Essay

1127 Words3 Pages

A gender role attitude is an individual’s interpretation and expectation on how a woman or man should behave. These assumptions create a socially accepted “norm” about each gender. In various lectures, we examined three common gender role ideologies; traditional, egalitarian, and transitional. A traditional gender role would fit into society’s fundamental outlook on a household. An individual holding this view would believe that men should work and earn money for the family, while women stay at home to do house work and take care of the kids. An egalitarian position believes that both women and men should equally distribute responsibility throughout every situation they are faced with. This would include dividing duties up evenly despite what type it is (more strenuous chores vs. easy chores). A transitional approach combines the traditional and egalitarian approaches together. A couple who practices this attitude would split up the tasks equally but in a way that still views men as holding the majority of the “household” power. For example, women would do the dishes and clean the house while men would cut the lawn and fix the car because those jobs are “more difficult”. …show more content…

The affective element of a gender role ideology is described as one’s attitude or feeling toward an individual based on their sex alone. This outlook is known as sexism. The cognitive component of our view toward gender roles is explained as “our beliefs about the features of the biological or psychological categories of male and female” (Helgeson, 2017, p.10). Finally, the behavioural piece of a gender role ideology is recognized as sex discrimination, which “involves the differential treatment of people based on their biological sex” (Helgeson, 2017, p.

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