Carraway 1 Nathalie Carraway Ms.

Gardner Honors English 1st Period 23 October 2013 Gender Roles in Society From the moment we are born, our genders have already given others a sense of who we are and who we will be. From the start we pick the pink Its a girl! or the blue Its a boy! balloons because the color matches the sex, we choose barbies or action figures because the interest matches the gender, we decide on dress-up and building blocks because the activity matches the personality. However, these perceptions falsely aim to encompass the nature of all human beings by their genetic makeup. These notions of what a woman or man should be and should portray are plastered across almost every avenue of media in the world. Over the course of the growth of humankind, members of society have worked to make changes to others views of gender expectations and bring acceptance to the differences that one may possess. In years past, common gender roles included that a woman be uneducated but the caretaker of the house, that they be sensitive, nurturing, caring ladies in their everyday life. The viewpoint of a man was that they were strong, brave, protective of their families. These concepts may have been true of many families, nevertheless, fathers may also be the primary caretaker of the family while women have been the primary providers financially. The efforts to diminish these effects of gender roles have undertaken a great deal of feats over the years, from the first womans suffrage to more recently, the first openly gay active professional athlete, Jason Collins. The overbearing oppressive opinions which come with gender roles have slowly been corrected. Still, there is an incredible amount of work to do in order to alter the beliefs of the

Carraway 2 world on gender stereotypes. Everyone in this room has most likely at some point in your life have seen an ad, movie, tv show, book, or article which explains or tells of a certain attribute which should be connotative with a certain gender. These perceptions are not gone, they are still showing up in everyday living. We learn about these through school. We learn about these through speech. We learn about these through the viewpoints of our elders, too. Lady Macbeths Unsex me here! we read, as if sex has everything to do with the choices that one makes. These connotations with gender are a fog, shadowing the sparkling realities and currents of hope which are possessed by men and women who think that they must follow a certain path in order to be seen as a productive woman or man of society. To quote Bryant McGill in his book Voice of Reason, It is the socially determined norms and traditions of gender roles, which must be challenged, and challenged with vigor. In order to redefine the ideas of gender based off of society, we all must play a part in the effort. After all, how can we expect for a change to be made if no one helps create that change? It is understandable that some may disagree with the existence that gender roles are still an issue, as we have already come so far in the advancement of society. Genetic variations occasionally take responsibility for certain interests and traits that are recurrent in genders. Nonetheless, these are not overwhelming final determinations of how one acts based on their sex. However, still there is evidence of these roles demonstrated constantly. For example, during my kindergarten year, when we were asked what wed like to do when we grew up one boy in my class exclaimed that he wanted to be a nurse in the future. From this he was laughed at and scrutinized because many other students in the class had been told that this was a girl job. These perceptions are not only existing in our minds but are evident in physical life as well, such as the wage gap between genders. According to the Center for American Progress, women earn 58 cents where a man

Carraway 3 would earn a full dollar doing the same exact job for the same amount of time. This may not seem like much, however over a 40 year career on average a woman would lose an estimated $431,000 as a result of this wage gap. These numbers become evident in the earnings of families across the nation. Our job as members of society and possible future mothers and fathers is to be accepting of all aspirations that upcoming young people may have so that they can help create a more open-minded, tolerant culture. Our job is to fight for equality of rights between men and women because we are equals no gender higher than the other. We can either fail to rid our society of gender perceptions, or we can let our society rid us of our differences.

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