Post 7: Gender

Gender role socialization, or the process by which a child begins to exhibit masculine or feminine behaviors, can have a significant impact on a baby even before he or she is born. The four major agents of socialization, family, school, peers, and media, are the main contributors.
Family can influence a child in many ways. A mother's choice of words or tone of voice may be different dependent on the sex of her baby while she's carrying it. With knowledge of the gender of their baby in utero, a couple might decide to paint their nursery pink for a girl or blue for a boy. After the child is born, many things such as clothes and toys will be different depending on if the baby is male or female. These differences act as social pressures or expectations of a child to uphold gender border. 

Often times a child adopts gender specific behavior by observing and imitating their parents. In many households the father will go to work and provide for the family while the mother stays home to cook, clean, and take care of the children. While these gender specific roles have been in place for many years, it is very stereotypical and can instill wrongful notions of superiority and inferiority in children.

When I was younger my brother and I had very different toys that played into this gender stereotype. While I had a pretend washer and dryer, tea set, and Barbie dolls, my brother had a plastic work bench, toy lawn mower, and action figures.

There are differences the educational experiences of boy and girls as well. Teachers tend to favor, challenge, pay more attention to, praise, and punish boys more severely despite the fact that girls are said to receive higher grades when they begin school. Girls are influenced to focus more attention on social skills and appearance rather than intellectual ability, which can make them fall behind academically. This can be problematic in the years to follow, making teenage girls feel less intelligent than their male counterparts, and causing them to be more apprehensive about breaking into male-dominated subjects such as math and science.

Another important agent of socialization is peer groups. Children have a natural tendency to want to play with other kids of the same gender, therefore increasing the chances a child will participate in gender typed activities. For example, if two girls are having a playdate, they are more likely to have a tea party, play with dolls, or give each other makeovers, than they are to rough house, play sports or video games. Children are expected to adhere to these gender borders or face the potential to be bullied, mocked, or harassed by their peers. The need to be liked by ones peers heightens during the teen years. Boys gain prestige through athletic success while girls with physical appearance and popularity. This immense peer pressure can often cause boys to become violent and girls to develop eating disorders from low self esteem.

The media has a particularly weighty effect on gender role socialization. Due to the influx of technological advances in recent years, the media has also become more prevalent, therefore having more of an impact on society and the behaviors of those that reside within it. TV, movies, magazines, books, and music establish portray gender specific behaviors, social norms, and values, which are internalized by children viewers. According to standards as set by the media, women should be beautiful, sensitive, reserved, and compassionate, and men should be strong and assertive.
Young girls are constantly bombarded by advertisements that negatively depict the physical appearance of women, as portrayed in the video "Onslaught" from the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. They feature photographs of actresses and models that are too thin, and/or have edited the pictures into looking a certain way that is otherwise unattainable. Because many young girls aspire to look like the women shown in the magazines but cannot because of the unattainably high standard of beauty, they develop low self esteem or dangerous eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia.

This is the original and edited photographs of Jennifer Lawrence featured in the magazine GQ.