Importance Of Gender Self-Schema

The self refers to a social being able perceive, interact and engage whilst distinguishing itself from others while schemas may be defined as categorization of ideas and a mental structure that sorts and perceive new information. Thus, self-schemas refer to generalizations of one’s self based on memories, experiences and roles in life in accordance to their gender, behavior, culture, physical attributes and social settings. Individuals may hold qualities that are important to them or are self-schematic to said qualities and at the same time may not be concerned about another specific quality, therefore being aschematic. The self-schema theory proposed by Hazel Markus (1977) not only affects cognitive processes but also behavioural domains.

This gender identity acts as a basis in the formation of gender self-schemas that may be brought forward to adulthood as children relate their behaviours to their sex and gender-relevant information. For example, a woman may develop a gender self-schema and believe that her gender determines her actions and treatment from others. Self-schemas generally developed by men encompasses roles, norms, values and belief that are associated with masculinity and career roles whilst that of women are associated with femininity and family roles. These core schemas are then regularly augmented by early socialization encounters (Markus & Oyserman, 1989). Although, it is untrue to state that all men and women will develop gender self-schema (Markus et al.,

Through everyday social interactions, a myriad of information is presented to an individual and how he sifts through the necessary input lies on the importance, relevance and structure of the information. Although in certain cases schema-irrelevant information may still be stored into existing self-schemas or are contradictory enough to form a new and separate self-schema while in some cases these information are suited to fit the existing self-schema in order to retain schema. A reinforced self-schema is easier to maintain even in the face of contradicting schema-relevant evidence (Markus, 1977). Literature and observations on patients of schema therapy and how they develop coping mechanisms to maintain their self-schemas will be used as examples. An individual who has developed a negative self-schema may not notice positive experiences and instead focus on failures and downfalls. This occurs when information perceived to be conflicting with a present self-schema is distorted, ignored or seen as irrelevant as a mean to discard the evidence and to view it as an exception to the schematic rule (Hastie, 1981; Bodenhausen, 1988; Beck et al., 1990 as cited by Padesky, 1994). Another example would be an individual seeking a job where there is lower risk of criticism of his abilities and groups of friends that are less prone to judgement