Social Construction Of Gender

Everybody in today’s society experiences gender throughout his or her life. However, as a female, I have personally always been affected by the social construction of gender in my day-to-day life, whether I was aware of it or not. Gender is such a prominent aspect of life for everyone that we barely recognize the effect it has on us, especially when it’s constructed within our own families. Growing up, my parents followed the stereotypical gender roles for my brother and I. From the moment we were born he was put in blue and I was put in pink. He was “a little ladies man” whereas I was “going to make some man real happy one day.” My parent’s didn’t mean any harm, they didn’t know any better because they were raised the same way; however, this type of thinking is what causes inequality between the genders in society. In Judith Lorber’s article The Social Construction of Gender she states, “Once a child’s gender is evident, others treat those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different treatment by feeling different and behaving differently” (Kirk 65). In simpler terms, since the
Gendered toys encourage children to act within their gender and never stray, “for girls, this would include a focus on attractiveness and appearance, perhaps leading to a message that this is the most important thing—to look pretty. For boys, the emphasis [is] on violence and aggression (weapons, fighting, and aggression)” (Blakemore). In other words, as a group, young girls are taught to be pretty, which leads to the social concept that teenage girls are vain and self-obsessed whereas young boys are taught to be wild and physical which leads to the concept that teenage boys are allowed to aggressively rough-house because ‘boys will be boys.’ This automatically constructs women as a group to be the subordinates to men as a