Gender Behavior

Paper Summary:

This paper explains that, while in recent decades there has been a great deal of ?gender-bending? based on physical and behavioral norms and on social training, there remains a deep-set stereotype regarding what is considered to be masculine and what is feminine. The author points out that children can identify the differences between males and females at around two years of age; gender norms are developed between the ages of two and five years old and can be observed in the play of children. The paper relates that, from the gender lessons of childhood combined with naturally occurring differences, men and women develop remarkably different communication styles.

From the Paper:

"Gender roles are largely fostered by the media, which overwhelmingly portrays people in stereotypical ways. Since World War II, television, movies, magazines, and other popular media have increasingly promoted thinner body images as the ideal for women, though today women are expected to have a far more physically fit thin body than in previous times, which does show some leaning towards a more "masculine" ideal for the feminine body. The ideal man is presented as trim and muscular, but never as ideally anorexic-like thin like their female counterparts. In television context, it is more important how girls look rather than what they do. One study of television commercials in 1996 found that men outnumbered women in appearances altogether."

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