Gender Roles Sociology

Gender roles affect everyone regardless of their age, gender, sexuality, or race. For the purposes of this essay we will define gender as he meaning society gives to people who identify as a male or a female as stated by J.J. Macionis, professor of sociology, in his book Society: The Basics (2017). Gender roles are also defined as the the roles society expects people of certain genders to perform. To provide a common example of gender roles we often hear, especially from the older generations, that women should stay at home and do the housework and take care of the kids where as men should change the oil on a car. Society also heavily discourages people who attempt to reverse gender roles. As an example, my father would often take me to the grocery store to give my mom a break from have to watch over and and whenever he did this someone would often ask him how he enjoyed babysitting me and we can make the correlation to society by using societal imagination. …show more content…
Because gender roles play such an important part in society our gender is often shown through our personality; for example, we often attribute women to people who are more empathetic and this is often times the case because women tend to be around their children more often than the man. Because these gender roles do shape the socialization process and by extension our personalities, if I had a job in front of me and a women and a man in front of me with the exact same resume, there are times in which I would choose on over the other purely because of their gender. An example where I would prefer a woman with the same qualifications as a male is a nurse. I not want the man to work because the woman would likely be more empathetic than the male and I believe this simply because of the gender roles which I have been taught all my