Gender Social Conditioning

The Influence Of Education On Gender Socialization The common misconception about gender nowadays is that it has the same meaning as sex, something innate and natural. However, since 1970s, increasingly more anthropologists like Margaret Mead agree that gender is something that can be conditioned and is prone to socialization. Since a young age, possibly around two to three years old when an infant begins to develop higher cognitive functions, society bombards them with different signals that slowly condition them into a specific gender role: male or female.

By gender role, I am referring to a set of attitudes or behaviors that is encouraged or at least expected of a person based on his or her gender. This also means that gender is malleable and a product of socio-cultural and historical contingencies – a social construct. Normal traits that we associate with a specific gender like aggressiveness with men and gentility with women are not as natural as they seem. In fact, these seemingly normative behaviors have been slowly fortifying our own perspectives about gender roles but also help shape people into a gendered being.

Therefore, boys are raised to conform to male gender role and girls are brought up to fit the female gender role. In a ‘Western Society’ for example the US or Europe, education becomes an integral part of a child’s livelihood from a very young age. The influences from education that condition children into specific gendered beings cannot be ignored as school time accounts for most of a child or teenager’s life.

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I am highlighting that this is common in ‘the West’ because family expectations or religious traditions might be the bigger factor or influence for gender socialization in communitarian or other types of societies. I would like to start with an observation I made about this particular issue while looking through an English language textbook for beginners. In a chapter about occupations, I noted that most jobs associated with the public sphere usually carry male connotations with them, for example, fireman or policeman.

Furthermore, the pictures depicting people in these public sphere jobs usually have male models. On the other hand, jobs related to servitude or obedience such as waitresses or nurses usually has female models portraying the jobs. This is where I first encountered an example of the issue of gender socialization in the education field. This particular example shows us that children from a young age have been conditioned to relate male with the public realm and also as dominant providers; whereas females are linked to obedience and serving others.

This fits in with Sack’s argument that women are discouraged to work in the public realm where their work could be properly evaluated and valued. These subliminal signals from school along with their family’s structure and parents’ roles or occupations could reinforce the children’s expectations for genders. This in turn would affect the children’s preference of jobs where they choose something that conforms to their genders’ characteristics and thus, the cycle of gender conditioning begins again.

Another very important gender socialization process that occurs during a child’s educational years is self-socialization. I first noted this phenomenon when I saw a teenage girl being ridiculed for wanting to play basketball with the boys and thought of another situation when my male friend was mocked for participating in a drama production. The common trend I have noticed is that when an individual does not behave or conform to his or her own gender’s expectations, society often reacts in a disapproving or negative manner.

Thus the ‘deviant’ individual through external pressure or other mechanisms like shame or punishment would hope to correct his or her own behavior so that it is more in tune with their gender expectations. From an early age, boys and girls would have started self-correcting their own behaviors so that they received less negative feedback from the external reality. This, however, reinforces the differences seen by children between male and female and ultimately leading to the conclusion that you can only behave like one or the other.

The duality of gender actually limits opportunities and potential an individual can have because if that specific skill or quality is not within a gender’s characteristics, it might be self-corrected and discarded through self-socialization. We can even see an example or offshoot of this issue in the homosexuality debate occurring right now, men who are acting in a supposingly ‘devious manner’ are being discriminated against not because of any biological reasons but because of socio-cultural pressure to conform to normative gender expectations.

This process of self-socialization starts from a relatively early age to shape us into what our society constitutes as male or female genders. Lastly, another aspect of education that has long-lasting effect on forming gendered beings is the way a classroom is ran and methods of teaching. There seems to be an emerging trend of a new style of teaching which uses a more open and interactive system, we see this in new schools such as ‘School Without Walls’. However, the majority of public or private schools in the US, or even around the world in this case, still follows a strict guideline on how students should behave in a classroom.

Desired qualities in an ideal student from a teacher’s perspective would be obedience, quietness, maturity, passiveness and patience. In a system where examinations and tests account for the majority of the grading criteria, a student behaving according to these qualities would do better than a student who is more active, ‘rebellious’ or passionate. One might notice that the characteristics that would allow a student to succeed in school are relatively feminine.

Especially considering that girls are thought to develop at a faster pace than boys and reach full cognitive maturity sooner. The female gender might have an intrinsic advantage at doing better in our education system over male students who are often described as more energetic, easily distracted and physical. The ways the education system functions and evaluates allow more matured female students to focus and excel in studies while more physical male students would start to lose interest in education all together.

This is a trend we have started to notice in the US where the dropout rate for male students is 50% higher than female students in a specific state; the significant gap shows that the education system clearly has different effects on male and female. To sum up how our way of teaching in classrooms can form gendered beings, one can say that boys are ‘discouraged’ from education or demotivated due to the education system’s inadaptability with intrinsic characteristics usually associated with male children such as aggressiveness and spirited.

This in turn would lead male children to focus more on their own physical aspect while female children who have better chances at completing school, would have less external pressure and could focus on their own mental capabilities and schoolwork. Thus, this social process successfully highlighted the gender differences and strengthens notions about how genders are formed socially. This particular process could later on lead to selecting careers that are clearly relegated to a specific gender.

The reinforcement of ideas about the duality of gender into our children’s minds would help them form their own concepts about gender roles and potential. From a children’s textbook to how a class is ran, it seems that our society is crammed with subliminal or direct signals that slowly shape us into our gender roles or to become a ‘gendered being’. According to Margaret Mead, gender is something that varies from culture to culture and the gender roles we have established here might not be the norm for another society.

Her work shows that gender roles or expectations are complex products of socio-cultural, economical and historical contingencies and not just something innate in our biological differences between male and female. Following her idea, I realized that in our society, a lot of these gender socialization processes have been institutionalized and even the smallest things could help form us into the gendered beings we are today. Hence, I started at an early stage of cognitive development where the mind is the most ‘absorbent’ so to speak.

In conclusion, I’ve found out that not only is the education system itself very much reinforcing these gendered ideas but as the children progress in this system, they also increasingly bolster these ideas in their peers through self-socialization, somewhat similar to a mutual exchange of ideas. Therefore, one can understand that the influence and effect of the educational system cannot be overlooked on how gendered ideas and eventually gendered beings are formed as these ideas carry themselves into the ‘real’ and ‘adult’ society where these gender expectations are then passed on again to the next generation like a cycle.

Bibliography: Abu-Lughod, Lila. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California, 1986. Print. Mack, Julie. "A Closer Look At The Gender Gap In High School Dropout. " The Kalamazoo Gazette. N. p. , Apr. 2012. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. Mead, Margaret. Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print. -------------------------------------------- [ 1 ]. Mack, Julie. "A Closer Look At The Gender Gap In High School Dropout. " The Kalamazoo Gazette. N. p. , Apr. 2012. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.

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