Gender Role Stereotypes I

Author : Ami Fitri Utami, SE., MSM

“..a boy in his age should be playing ball, not twirling some sissy baton…it’s embarrassing…”
Tom Oddette (Character in Joseph Goldman’s’ short story).

Above quotes was just an example that people may have an expectation on what female and male should be. In the other hand, some people are not recognizing about ones’ behavior until that person act differently compared to others’ in the same gender. For instance, we often see some talk shows which exposed women with unusual jobs like a pilot, an air force member or even a bus driver and some other masculine jobs. Thus, they often seen as a “Super Woman” and this is happened since these women do something out of peoples’ expectations. This response will also happened to men, although the phenomenon of a “stayed at house dad” is already common nowadays, most people still cannot resist to feel awkward, weird and even see it as something that should not be done by men.

These expectations could be simply called as a gender role and it may change, even vary from one to another. This article will review and examine what does the changes of the gender role and what influence it.

Gender role is defined as all things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively (Money, 1955) . The identical part about gender role and status also commonly contended by Schaefer (2006), that gender role defines as expectations of the proper behavior, attitudes and activities of males and females. Defining gender role deeper, Park (1996) argue in his paper about the two dimension of gender role itself as masculinity includes being aggressive, independent, objective, logical, rational, analytical and decisive while femininity as emotional, sensitive, expressive, cooperative, intuitive, warm and tactful nature. The statement also strengthen by William et al (2009) who argued that young girls are encouraged to be empathetic, social and caring, while young boys are encouraged to be brave, independent, and accomplished. From those explanation about gender role, it is obvious that gender role talked about how a person behave with gender as their base, it is like you are doing “A” because it is a proper behavior for a man or doing “B” because maybe in your family it is what a woman should do. It is also can be says as what a person should do or should not do as a male or female.