Gender Socialisation Essay

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Gender Socialisation in the Family
Gender is usually interchangeably used with sex which is closely related but is different in meaning. The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines gender as ‘the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.’ Whereas Sex is defined as ‘the biological and physiological characteristics that define men and women. (“What do we mean by ‘sex’ and ‘gender’?,” 2012). Additionally, this is simplified in the same text by putting male and female in sex categories and masculinity and femininity in gender categories. Most people match sex with gender, that is, if you are born female you will be feminine and if born male, masculine. Although this may usually be the case, one does not determine the other (Newman & Grauerholz, 2002, pp. 115). Nevertheless, In this paper I argue that …show more content…

They pass on their own belief about gender (Witt, 1997) thus, according to Crespi (2004), ‘in the family the gender characterisation reflects the individualities of parents.’ Indisputably, parents interact differently with their sons and daughters (Witt, 1997).They tend to raise daughters in a more gentle manner than sons. For instance, they call their daughters by gentle names such as, little angel, princess, little miss sunshine and boys are addresses by much aggressive names such as little monster, Mr. Messy, superman,etc. Additionally, parents encourage gender roles by dressing their children in gender-specific colours, girls in pink and boys in blue (Nowaczyk, 2003). They also provide gender-differentiated toys such as dolls and manipulative toys for girls and cars ,tools, sports toys and superhero figures for boys. Clearly, girls toys foster nurturing, social proximity and role play while boys toys promote motor skills, aggression, and solitary play (Boundless,

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