Week 3: Gender and Families

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Week 3 Gender and Families

• Sociology 169
• Changing Family Forms
• Professor Silverstein

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What Is Gender?

• Sex vs. Gender
• Can gender identity be modified?
• Is biology destiny?

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What Is Gender?

• The role of androgens and other hormones
• Bio-social theories
• Variation in gender patterns are social
• Society magnifies biological differences
• Evolutionary theory
• Darwinian theories of role division

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How Do We Learn Gender Roles?

• Gender roles sets of behaviors commonly
  exhibited by men and women
• Socialization reward and punishment to reinforce
  gender appropriate behavior

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How Do We Learn Gender Roles?

• Peer groups
• Competition and dominance vs. negotiation and
  compromise
• Media images of male and female behavior

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How Do We Learn Gender Roles?

• Psycho-analytic approach
• Unconscious process of identification/internalizat
  ion
• Interactionist approaches
• Stresses inequality, history, fluidity,
  malleability
• Gender system needs to be recreated every day

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Example of Variation in Gender Roles The
Tyranny of Averages
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The Blurred Dichotomy of Sex
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The False Dichotomy of Gender
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Sex, Gender, and Smoking
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Changing Gender Norms
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Inappropriate Gender Role Behavior

• Edmund Muskie cried in Feb 1972 in reaction to a
  newspaper attack on his wife
• Why was this seen as not masculine?

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Male Domination?

• Patriarchal societies
• Sex-gender system
• Role sorting
• Comparable-worth

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Media Images of Ideal Woman
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(No Transcript)
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Another Image of Women
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Preview of Film about Body Image and Self-Esteem
of Adolescent and Adult Women
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Gender Inequality
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Male Domination?

• Patriarchal societies
• Social order based on domination of women by men
• Sex-gender system
• Using specific biological differences as basis
  for a social order of male domination
• Comparable-worth
• Even if qualifications, education, and job tenure
  are taken into account, women earn less than men

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How Is Male Domination Reinforced

• Family socialization
• Discrimination in hiring and pay
• Economic system benefits from low wage labor or
  women

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How Is Male Domination Reinforced

• Unpaid household labor of women allow men to be
  paid lower wages
• Housework and child rearing not being counted as
  part of the gross domestic product
• Son preference is still strong in some societies
  and cultures
• Government policies that reinforce gendered
  division of labor

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Two Perspectives on Gender Relations

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Two Perspectives on Gender Relations
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as to
the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife
as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of
which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits
to Christ, so also wives should submit to their
husbands in everything.
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Male Perspectives

• What is masculinity?
• Characteristics society defines as typical of
  men.
• The mens movement of 1980s and 1990s reflected
  rejection of feminists negative view of men but
  focused on getting in touch with the fierce
  inner male.

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The Expressive Mens Movement
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Male Backlash
Revenge of the Deadbeat Dads
Divorced fathers will get to share more of their
children's lives only when courts start thinking
of them as more than walking wallets
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The Conservative Perspective

• Promise keepers bringing religion into
  reinforcing traditional and hierarchical family
  roles.

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The Rise of Fathers

• Fathers became important fathering, and
  househusbands.