Notes: Gender as a Social Construct - 2 | Child Development and Pedagogy - CTET & State TET PDF Download

Gender Stereotypes

Stereotype refers to our pre-conceived notions about some persons or groups. It is done both at the conscious and unconscious level. Gender is essentially a composite of negative beliefs held by larger people about a group and its member. Gender stereotype is evident in many aspects of life, including personal traits, behaviours, occupations, hobbies, appearance, family functions, communication, sports activities and preferences. Gender stereotypes shape people’s behaviours, expectations, and roles; conversely, roles can become stereotypes. Stereotypes can be identified in different ways.

Stereotypes of Man and Woman 

Stereotyping women’s role is seen in almost all the societies in the world. Women are always perceived as vulnerable and weak, needing protection and not able to survive alone. This protection will be provided by the male member of the society, i.e., the father, brother, husband and son. They are told from their childhood that they always need support. This very notion rejects their capabilities, intelligence and courage to make a change. They are told that they need assistance in their work. These kinds of stereotypes motivate people to patronise women. Women are also seen as lacking the ability and life skill to make their own decisions; therefore, most of their decisions are taken by others at different stages of their life. Their abilities and capabilities have been made stereotype. 

Women have also been presented as sex objects and the media has played a major role in this. Even among women, beauty is defined based on their overt looks. A woman’s physical appearance has been more emphasised than any of her other attributes such as courage or intelligence. There have also been instances of women being rejected based on their physical appearance. These women who do not fit in the accepted definition of “beautiful” begin to feel inferior about themselves. However, there have also been exceptions and we have examples where women have taken a proactive role with leadership quality. Nevertheless, stereotypes are so rigid that such women are called manly women.

Understanding gender stereotype does not end with the stereotype faced by women. Boys have to conform to the opposite stereotype. Boys are expected to be brave and confident. Society conditions them to behave in a particular fashion that they cannot conduct themselves in any way other than expected behaviour. They are told to be strong and assertive, if not aggressive. It has been accepted in many societies the men are rational and strong. They are expected to be bread-winners for the family. If a boy, for any reason, is unable to do that, he is criticised. He will be branded as having become a woman and advised to wear bangles, and so on. A boy has to play the role of a hero in society and faces too much expectation from the family. Thus, the working field has been divided clearly such that women are expected to take care of the house and men are expected to earn money for the family. It is also significant to mention here that household work has not been considered as being equal to outside work and is always thought of as a nonpaying job. Therefore, the only person who earns money for the family is the man of the house and he becomes the most important person in the family and for the society. It is good to acknowledge here that this situation is now changing as more women is entering into different fields and education has played a very significant role in this regard. Women are also contributing to the family’s earning and the stereotypical definition of the breadwinner being associated with men is gradually weakening. However, the conventional system still prevails in most parts of India. Working women are seen as women with loose character in many communities in India. The husband also has to bear the brunt of letting his wife go to work since others taunt him saying that since his wife is working, she must be characterless. This often becomes the reason for family conflict and in some situations, it becomes the cause for divorce. Along the same line, if the woman earns more than the man, it start hurting the man’s ego and women also start throwing hints that their men cannot run the family alone. There are many other related complex issues.

Imagine a man who is looking after the home while the woman goes out to earn their livelihood. In the pre-defined role, the man seems to be a misfit. He would be criticised by his neighbours, the society and also by his own family. In this context, education plays a significant role in developing a positive attitude in society to see man and woman equally with an egalitarian perspective.

In brief, stereotypes are the norms that have to be followed by the members of a society and if one does not play the expected role, he or she has to face criticisms. Brave, strong, outgoing, assertive etc. are qualities associated with men while obedience, geniality and softness are a few traits associated with women.

Problems with Gender Stereotypes

Stereotypes are unhealthy for any society and need to be abolished. Similarly, gender stereotypes are harmful for both men and women since they constrain the opportunities and experiences to which men and women have access. It does not allow parity in society. Gender stereotype can be considered as an invisible line drawn by society, which man and woman are both expected to follow. This line creates discrimination and an unequal society. These stereotypes create problems in all spheres of life. In school, based on these stereotypes, the roles played by girls and boys are divided. It can be commonly seen in schools that, on any celebration, it is the girl child who is selected to sing a song because singing is considered to be associated with girls. Similarly, manual work is given to boys according to their physical strength. The problems do not end here; rather they keep growing and influence subject selection, career selection and so on. Some courses at the school level are also gendered, as in the case of humanities for girls and commerce and sciences for boys. Even in higher academics, courses are seen to be gendered: girls often take home science while boys prefer economics and so on.

A negative consequence of stereotyping a person is a concept known as stereotype threat. This is a type of problem in which a person feels anxiety about his or her behaviour and imagines that his or her actions may conform to a negative stereotype of the person’s group. Such anxiety hinders these people’s performance, influences their decisions, their participation in various activities and so on. Stereotyping also causes one gender to feel that they cannot do a particular kind of work. This enforced understanding manifests as low efficiency and less confidence in a particular person. Thus, stereotypes influence both the present and future of an individual and it is important to abolish such gender categorisation based on discriminatory practices.

Gender Stereotypes and Media

Media influence has a major impact on our ways of seeing the world. It is mostly unconscious, but as Freud argued, unconscious is vastly influential in shaping and making what a person is. This influence of media is also understood by Albert Bandura social learning theory where he recognises the media’s role in shaping behaviour. Media is a leading factor for gender stereotyping. It has tightened the gendered roles to the extent that every day we are reminded of our role standard. It can be found in every media form, print and electronic. In advertising, women are presented mostly in ads of detergent powder or homely items and sexually exciting eating or deodorant ads. They are more often used for pushing man to do more. Women, depicted as sex objects, are also noticed across mass media. Women are less found showing intellectual prowess, not beauty. This beauty notion is so ingrained in television media that being beautiful is depicted as a necessary precondition for achieving success.

Feature films have contributed immensely towards widening gender divides. In most of the Hindi or regional movies, men are protagonists and women are to dance and smile and considered as assisting the hero in performing roles. The role of mother, sister, and wife get standardised and typified by cinema and are thus reinforced. Women are mostly presented in sexually attributive terms and shown to be dependent on man. 

Thus, it is seen that media contributes negatively towards masculine and feminine identity. It increases the divide and rarely works towards lessening it. Further, a female person gets less paid in media than a male person. Man is found in most of the decision making positions and women have to make do with assistant jobs. Women actresses often complain about being paid less than their male counterparts.

Gender in Education

Gender discrimination is found in education at different levels; at teachers’ perception, classroom interaction, in curriculum and parent expectation regarding education.

Gender Stereotypes in Curriculum 

Most textbooks portray sexual division of labour. Women are depicted as working in the kitchen and rearing babies without any help from man. Man are presented in professional settings and doing office-type jobs. In a content analysis of Madhya Pradesh textbooks, it was found that in most of the stories boys were portrayed as active, intelligent, brave and leading character of the story while girls are at best shown as being helpful and emotionally supportive. As textbooks legitimise knowledge and play a great part in the construction of worldly knowledge, these stereotypes display a major threat towards any idea of eliminating stereotypes. Students would find themselves unconsciously slipping towards conventional gendered roles that are oppressive and there is a need for urgent action to annihilate it. Besides Madhya Pradesh, the texts books of many other states were also found to reinforce the traditional roles assigned to males and females and did little to minimise it. When a child reads such textbooks and is confronted with the same gendered view of the world, it is great probable that he or she will take gender distinction as sex distinction and cognise it as natural construct.

Gender Stereotype in Pedagogy 

Teachers are found perpetuating gender roles in the classroom as well. It has been found that teacher expectation is greater for boys than girls. Girls speak less than boys in the class. Teacher interaction in the classroom happens mostly with boys as girls remain silent most of the time. It was even found that while teaching, teachers face the boys more than they do girls as they are more responsive. Teachers are thus found to be reinforcing the unfounded assumption about girls that they are less intelligent in mathematics and that their only purpose is to be married off, while boys are seen as men of the world and active participants in the search of knowledge. Girls’ meek and genteel nature is sharply contrasted with the domineering and bold image of boys who walk into harsh realities of the world. In classroom interaction too, they put down girls by saying they do not know the world. In a classroom where a girl can have equal space to question and articulate her thought, her intellectual growth is stifled by the un-encouraging atmosphere created by teachers and boys. Teachers needs to be aware of the fact that it is their responsibility of create a co-operative and productive atmosphere in the classroom where girls, without inhibition, can speak and inquire.

Education as Further Extension of Gendered Society or for Gender Equality

In most societies, a joint association of the institutions of family and kinship ensures that a little girl starts to learn, from infancy onwards, that it is her destiny to leave her natal home for an uncertain future in a family to which she will belong after marriage. This inculcation is done through cultural practices ranging from religious rituals to everyday language of lullabies, songs, idioms and metaphors. Many communities are monomaniac in their pursuit of matrimony, the girl’s appearance, body movements, habits and dispositions and strive to cultivate the approved model of beauty, self-restraint and self-abnegation. The natural desire for freedom a girl might have felt as a baby must be dissolved into a regime of responsibility and self-denial. Space and time are supposed to shrink into increasingly narrow corridors of activity which leaves one wondering whether girls have a childhood at all; it is straight from infancy into adulthood. Secondly, society sets up an explicit conflict between the aims of girls’ socialisation at home and their education at school. Krishna Kumar says “Tradition and customs compel girls to learn, during childhood, that they must submit to male authority in all aspects of their life.” The core of this learning lies in giving up any claim to intellectual autonomy and individual uniqueness. With the full force of religious and caste beliefs, and their representations in mythology likely to make an impression on the young mind, girls are made to internalise the all-encompassing social value of their bodies as an agency for reproduction. “Restrictions on physical movement and posture and on the use of time and space begin much before puberty, but after menarche these restrictions acquire comprehensive rigour”. These comprehensive restrictions leave little space for a girl to seek education as an individual. Krishna Kumar argued further about incompatibility between a girl’s life and education goals. “If we add to these the chronic anxiety about the inescapability of leaving one’s parents’ home, we can somewhat appreciate how incompatible, in India, the norms of girlhood are with the basic principles of education. These principles revolve around the child’s agency and freedom. Progressive pedagogy is supposed to enhance the child’s confidence and encourage her to develop her identity as an individual. Both in terms of its emotional content and the reasoning on which it is based, the agenda of cultural imprinting of girls’ minds contradicts the objectives of child-centred education”. Leela Dube does not hesitate to articulate this conflict: “Can we really think of reforming the education system to bring about a more “enlightened” relationship between the sexes as long as the larger structures which provide the context for the education system continue to reproduce gender-based relationships of domination and subordination?” Both scholars seem to agree that larger social structure holds key for any change in girls’ situation. Until then, education cannot do much to bring about major change in girls’ lives. 

Another school of thought argues that school can be a site for social change. They cite the example of education in creating women who have successfully challenged the gendered norms of society and creating a niche for themselves. They see great value of education in fighting gender inequality in society.