Gender Role Development Flashcards, test questions and answers

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What is Gender Role Development?

Gender role development is a process in which individuals learn and internalize the expectations of their gender from society. Through this learning process, individuals come to understand the roles that are appropriate for them in terms of behavior and attitude. Gender roles can be learned through observation of parents, siblings, peers, and other adults in their environment as well as through media messages. Understanding gender role development can provide insight into how gender-based stereotypes shape our lives.Throughout early childhood, children observe and take note of adult behaviors that they associate with either masculinity or femininity. These observations allow them to develop an understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman within the family structure and within society at large. As children reach adolescence, they encounter increasingly more opportunities to observe how gender roles are expressed outside their immediate family unit. They then take these observations and use them to create an internalized sense of what it means to be a man or woman according to societal norms. This internalized sense guides adolescents when forming relationships with others and making decisions about their own identity formation such as educational goals or career choices based on stereotypical gender roles for each sex (e.g., women are expected to pursue careers in traditionally female-dominated fields such as nursing). Alongside these traditional norms for gender roles there has been an increasing acceptance that individuals have diverse gender expressions which may challenge dominant social expectations surrounding masculinity and femininity (e.g., non-binary genders). This shift has helped foster greater understanding among adults that all forms of identity expression should be respected regardless of someone’s sex assigned at birth or whether they identify with traditional male/female labels or not at all. In conclusion, understanding how gender role development works is essential in order to understand how we form our identities around notions of masculinity and femininity within our societies today as well as how we can challenge traditional stereotypes by celebrating diverse forms of identity expression regardless of one’s sex assigned at birth.