How Do Gender Roles Affect Society

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Introduction A man should not cry; a woman should want to be a mother. Men should strive to be smart and rich; women should strive to be beautiful. These are examples of gender roles present in today’s society. Gender roles are defined as set behavioral guidelines within which members of their respective gender are supposed to act. They are not written down per say, but they are engrained in the culture as a whole. This essay will focus specifically on gender roles as they are present in American society. Gender roles are not innately bad or good, they simply exist around the culture which created them. It is the ways in which men and women treat each other in regards to these roles and how people are perceived when they violate these …show more content…

They show how gender roles affect our childhood development (Iervolino , Knafo, & Plomin, 2005), how our willingness to conform to gender roles affects our job (Judge & Livingston 2008), and how they affect the ways in which we help each other (Eagly 2009). They also may have impacts on our mental health (Gregory, Wampold, & Zamarripa 2003). It seems the only aspect of our lives they do not affect are our tendency towards certain kinds of prejudice (Stefurak, Taylor,& Mehta 2010). The question still hangs about if they are harmful to our society. These gender roles manipulate the population to conform to them have shaped our society into what it is. Gender roles are learned during childhood, and development against them is labeled as atypical development (Iervolino , Knafo, & Plomin, 2005). These ideals of masculinity versus femininity have affects upon our mental health, causing the way men display affection to be very refined and narrow (Gregory, Wampold, & Zamarripa 2003). As we move through life, our willingness to conform to these ideals affect our income, as men who conform will earn more and women who conform will earn less (Judge & Livingston 2008). The innate problem with conformity is that it denies individuals their freedom of expression; their wants to be their own person. Forcing multitudes of people to conform or be ostracized is an incredible strenuous task and takes its toll upon the

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