How Behaviorism Concepts Affect Gender Roles

How Behaviorism Concepts Affect Gender Roles What is gender, and how is it different than sex? According to the Oxford Dictionary, “Either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones”. In other words, while sex is purely based on what physical body parts a person has, gender is a social and cultural role that can be either male or female. That being said, gender is something that children learn at a young age from watching and interacting with people older than them. Three basic behaviorism concepts can be seen in the way children learn gender roles, and they are as follows: classical conditioning, positive reinforcement, and negative punishment, …show more content…
It starts as they are able to see and comprehend. In other words, from an early age, children learn gender roles based on what their parents and the people around them say and do. If they see a parent, of the same sex as them, continually doing a task, they begin to associate the specific sex with the task. For example, if a girl’s mom does the dishes every night, the child becomes conditioned to think that the act of doing the dishes is the job of a female. In the same way, if a boy grows up playing and watching football with his dad, he is likely to believe that football is a game for men. In both cases, the children saw someone of the same sex doing a particular action over and over again, and they became conditioned to think that the action was gender specific without being told so. This is one way that behaviorism affects the learning of gender