Gender Socialization

This is the script from my presentation regarding Gender socialization.

After listening to Sieng Hor’s explaination regarding how your occupation and workplace can shape your attitude and behaviour, let’s move on to another interesting yet controversial topic: Socialization into gender. Before I go any deeper, I’d like to pose some key questions regarding this topic. “Are female born to be emotional?” For exp: whenever they watch a sad love story and the main actor or actress die, more often than not they will end up crying.
To clear your doubt, we will elaborate in the following slides.

First of all, let’s define this key term: Gender role. T asks “Can you anything strange about this picture?” The picture is strange because in general people expect boys to play with cars or gun, girls to play with dolls. 

As we have learned earlier from the previous presentation, who we are and how we behave and what we think is a final product of a process called Socialization. At the same time, through socialization we also learn our gender role, in other words what is appropriate and not appropriate for our gender. We are not born to know about our gender role (boy should do this, girl should do that, boy shouldn’t do this, girl shouldn’t do that), it is the society that tells us so.

 Let’s analyze on how family shape who we are. You see, it is very difficult for a child to grow into an adult without facing any gender stereotyping.  At a very young age, we were taught what is masculine (which is a male quality), feminine (female quality). Boys are told they should not cry, weak and afraid of anything, but they should be strong and dominant. On the other hand, girls are told to be gentle.

 Our parents choose the color of our clothes according to our gender, pink or red to girl, blue to boy. Our parents also buy different kinds of toy for us to play. They would buy gun or car for boys, and barbie doll for girls. They also expect different behaviour from the two kids. Parents also choose different kinds of activity. They would encourage their daughter to do some housework and encourage their son to play sport. Moreover, boys are allowed to go far away from home and late at night, whereas girls should stay at home.

Psychologists Susan Goldberg and Michael Lewis conduct an observation on a mother with her 6-month-old infants.