The Nurture of Gender

What biology creates, culture develops.  Society has expectations about how men and women behave.  These are classified as gender roles.  For example, many believe that it is tradition for men to initiate dates, drive the car, work to bring home a paycheck, and handle any hard laborour work.  Whereas, the women are expected to be home-makers, take care of the children, and cook.  Gender roles can help in the way that they provide an already established way of things working between mena and women.  It can smooth awkward conversations about who should take care of what.  Therefore, in that case, gender roles are benneficial.  Evolution has predisposed men to their aggressive and tough nature to serve their reproductive goals.  Yet, some gender roles are not fixed by evolution, because they vary from culture to culture.  Gender roles everywhere have tended to women's rights and power.  Women's gender roles also vary over time and between cultures as well.  Another point about the nurture of gender is gender identity.  It is the sense of being male or female.  To some degree we become gender-typed.  That means that some boys are more masculin than others. while some girls are more femine than others. Social Learning Theory assumes that children learn gender-linked behaviors by observing and imitating and by being rewarded and punished.  Gender Schema Theory combines social learning theory with cognition.  Thus, the nature of gender is influenced by a lot of outside factors that determine how men and women behave in society.

-Paige Barbour (Pd 8)