Gender role socialization harms everyone 

Delving into this week of “Inside Maddie’s Mind,” I’ll let y’all know up front — I’m using this as an opportunity to study for an exam I have later this week. However, it’s an important topic, so I’ll get right into it: the harm of gender roles. 

For those who haven’t entrenched themselves as deeply into the world of the humanities as I have, taking so many HDFS and WGSS courses that this all becomes a repetitive review each semester, gender roles are ways of appearing and behaving that meet cultural expectations based on an individual’s gender. They encompass ways we’re expected to act, speak, dress, groom and conduct ourselves based on our sex assigned at birth. 

Really, these break down into two categories: having traditionally masculine traits, which are thought of as instrumental and active; or traditionally feminine traits, which are thought of as expressive and social. Men are taught to be competitive, mastery-oriented and independent; women are taught to be relationship-oriented, open to emotions, warm, helpful and sensitive. Androgyny refers to someone having both masculine and feminine traits — something that’s certainly possible, but not as encouraged by society. And contrary to popular belief, instrumental and expressive traits are independent of each other. That is, having more of one does not mean you lack the abilities to develop the other. 

However, these supposedly innate “sex differences” are really social constructions. People have similar potential to develop either types of traits, or a combination of both. But, we treat individuals differently based on how we perceive their gender, therefore socializing them toward different things and thus building these differences ourselves. 

The bottom line is that traditional gender role socialization has negative consequences for everyone. In practice, the issue is not actually one individual having more traditionally masculine or feminine traits, but rather individuals being blocked societally from developing characteristics associated with the perceived other sex. 

For example, we can look at aggression in men. You could attribute expressing anger outwardly — as men are often taught to do — to someone having been blocked from expressive development. Thus, men are not more likely to have “anger issues” (a.k.a. outward expressions of anger via aggression) because they are socialized to have more instrumental traits, but because they are often blocked from developing expressive traits since these are considered “feminine.” 

On average, men not being feminine is more strongly policed than women not being masculine. Think of the the way young girls who are “tomboys” are more or less accepted societally. But if a little boy is too “girly,” those with a narrow, traditional view of gender will assume he is going to “grow up to be gay.” They may even discourage his interest in activities perceived as feminine, and encourage him to be more masculine in any way possible. Thus, we socialize men to avoid expressive traits that we perceive as feminine. 

But of course, there are also extremely negative consequences of gender role socialization for women as well. Think of the common objectification of women, coupled with higher rates of body dissatisfaction and other body image issues in women compared to those in men. It’s not that men cannot have body image issues, but they are more likely to occur in women, and a contributing factor to that is our gender role socialization of women. We place a high level of significance on a woman’s appearance — to the point of objectification — and by treating women as objects based on the perceived value of their bodies rather than treating them as people, we build body image anxiety and further contribute to poor self esteem implications. 

We can also explore the sexual double standard that exists, as female sexual behavior is more strongly policed than male sexual behavior. Or further, women overall are instrumentally devalued and expected to self-sacrifice, which has negative implications for their sense of competence in general. 

Beyond this, if we think of gender as a binary thing with specific, inherent rules, there isn’t room left in such a traditional society for anything other than “male” and “female” based on one’s sex assigned at birth — leaving out and effectively denying the existence of nonbinary, gender nonconforming and transgender individuals. 

Traditional gender role socialization harms everyone, not just women as a result of our patriarchal society. Thus, the challenge we have going forward is to not block children from either feminine or masculine development, regardless of their sex. 

Even if kids are not receiving explicit messages of approval or disapproval based on how well they conform to gender stereotypes — though we all receive implicit messages of this — they still learn through observation of close family members. For example, a child might observe that “Mom seems more concerned about her appearance than Dad,” or “Dad does not verbally interact with me as much as Mom” and internalize these observations moving forward as differences inherent to one’s gender. Thus, while it’s not the parents’ fault for acting differently in accordance to gender — they were socialized to do so by society — there’s still a negative consequence for everyone involved. 

Fixing the issues caused by gender role socialization requires a societal upheaval, and a massive mindset switch. However, it is possible. I once saw a TikTok that really sums it up pretty well, pretty much saying “We could have done this society thing any way we wanted and we really went with strip malls and gender roles.” Honestly, this is the core of my argument. It doesn’t have to be this way — after all, we made it like this in the first place.