The Importance Of Gender Socialization

Since we are born, gender socialization becomes a part of our lives. Gender Socialization is the “attitudes and behavior that are expected of us because we are a male or a female” (Henslin, 2014,pg. 74). This means that as we grow up, we learn different characteristics and values attributed to males or females according to our culture. During the observation in stores, we can observe that there is segregation between children’s clothing and toys based on their sex. For example, JcPenney has divided its first floor in two main sections: one for girls and one for boys. Each section differs from one another in its decoration, toys, colors and designs used for clothing. For instance, the clothing of girls are colorful such as pink, neon colors, purple while for boys are dark colors such as blue, black, and green. Consequently, we can assume that color plays an important part in the gender socialization because colors can symbolize the femininity or masculinity of children. Likewise, clothes’ design and texture are other factors that shows how children are separated by their gender. For example, girls’ clothing is soft, lighter, thinner and with fashionable styles of female figures from Disney. Girl’s designs are an indirectly way to tell them that they should be passive, sweet, and adorable. On the other hand, boys’ clothing is plain with designs …show more content…
Regarding of the negative effect of gender socialization, gender socialization is necessary in our past-modern world because it helps us to understand about gender roles and how it can affect children, young people, and elderly people. Besides, socialization makes possible that people gain knowledge, learn skills and appropriate norms to them. It just depends on how our parents teach us about gender socialization and how we practice their