Sex Roles
From Encyclopedia of Sex and Sexuality
The prescribed social roles—the things people are expected to do and the ways they are expected to behave—that are believed to be appropriate for men and women, based on their sex, are called sex roles. The culture of each society typically defines women’s and men’s roles and regards them as “natural.” They are communicated informally but forcefully from one generation to another through family and media and institutions such as schools and churches; often they are embodied in the country’s laws. (In the recent past, for example, American laws prohibited women from working in occupations such as mining on the grounds that such work was too dangerous for them.)
Yet, although some roles are nearly universal—such as the mothering role for women and the soldiering role for men—other roles associated with women and men may vary in different societies or change over time. Thus, in the United States certain occupational roles such as secretary or primary school teacher, which today are commonly regarded as women’s roles, were once considered to be men’s occupational roles.
Today a distinction is made between sex roles, which refer to biologically determined activities (such as a nursing mother or a sperm donor), and gender roles, which are socially constructed (such as those defining an attorney’s work or a plumber’s work as male and a nurse’s work or a kindergarten teacher’s work as female).
It is often difficult for people living in one society to believe the differences that exist in the assignment of gender roles in other societies. Thus, dentists, nearly always male in America, are nearly always female in Denmark and other countries. Similarly, a majority of lawyers and accountants are female in many Eastern European countries and over 75 percent of the physicians in the former Soviet Union are women.
Typically, additional expectations are attached to sex roles or gender roles specifying the preferred behavior the person in the role is expected to exhibit, as well as the behavior considered inappropriate. When an individual exhibits preferred behavior, he or she is rewarded and given social approval; when an individual defies social convention and behaves in a way considered deviant or inappropriate, the behavior is disapproved and he or she is punished in some way.
Thus, a woman who becomes an engineer may be regarded as someone taking on a role deviant to her sex, and if in addition she acts domineering and aggressive she is seen as violating the rules for behavior expected of a woman. (Trying to explain such a case, some might say she is “trying to be like a man.”) Men, too, face social disapproval if they take an occupational role regarded as female (perhaps as a nurse or a telephone operator) or if they play their roles in a way regarded as feminine.
All societies impose general behavior norms (meaning what is regarded as normal behavior) for men and women and specific norms for their roles in different social spheres such as occupations or the family. Gender role behavior is specified in all spheres of life, even in the most private sexual activities. But in spite of traditional expectations, we are finding more and more that all men and women are capable of a wide range of behavior, both in the bedroom and the world outside.
