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Gender role

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A gender role , or sex role , is a set of socially accepted behaviors and attitudes deemed appropriate or desirable for individuals based on their sex. Gender roles are usually centered on conceptions of masculinity and femininity .

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91-428: The specifics regarding these gendered expectations may vary among cultures, while other characteristics may be common throughout a range of cultures. In addition, gender roles (and perceived gender roles) vary based on a person's race or ethnicity . Gender roles influence a wide range of human behavior , often including the clothing a person chooses to wear, the profession a person pursues, manner of approach to things,

182-496: A host of men, a band of comrades as well as a swarm or flock of animals. In Classical Greek , the word took on a meaning comparable to the concept now expressed by "ethnic group", mostly translated as " nation , tribe, a unique people group"; only in Hellenistic Greek did the term tend to become further narrowed to refer to "foreign" or " barbarous " nations in particular (whence the later meaning "heathen, pagan"). In

273-426: A sex role , is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex . Gender roles can be linked with essentialism , the idea that humans have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity based on their gender. Sociologists tend to use the term "gender role" instead of "sex role", because

364-632: A third gender . Buginese society has identified five genders. Androgyny has sometimes also been proposed as a third gender. An androgyne or androgynous person is someone with qualities pertaining to both the male and female gender. Some individuals identify with no gender at all. Many transgender people identify simply as men or women, and do not constitute a separate third gender. Biological differences between (some) trans women and cisgender women have historically been treated as relevant in certain contexts, especially those where biological traits may yield an unfair advantage, such as sport. Gender role

455-663: A 2011 report from the Center for American Progress . Gender roles may be a means through which one expresses one's gender identity , but they may also be employed as a means of exerting social control , and individuals may experience negative social consequences for violating them. Different religious and cultural groups within one country may have different norms that they attempt to "police" within their own groups, including gender norms. The roles of women in Christianity can vary considerably today (as they have varied historically since

546-421: A focus on the interface between groups. "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries", therefore, is a focus on the interconnectedness of ethnic identities. Barth writes: "...   categorical ethnic distinctions do not depend on an absence of mobility, contact, and information, but do entail social processes of exclusion and incorporation whereby discrete categories are maintained despite changing participation and membership in

637-464: A fuller beard), an Adam's apple , wearing a woman's dress and high heels, carrying a purse would most likely draw ridicule or other unfriendly attention in ordinary social contexts. Because the dominant class sees this form of gender expression as unacceptable, inappropriate, or perhaps threatening, these individuals are significantly more likely to experience discrimination and harassment both in their personal lives and from their employers, according to

728-499: A mercurial character. Ronald Cohen concluded that ethnicity is "a series of nesting dichotomizations of inclusiveness and exclusiveness". He agrees with Joan Vincent's observation that (in Cohen's paraphrase) "Ethnicity   ... can be narrowed or broadened in boundary terms in relation to the specific needs of political mobilization." This may be why descent is sometimes a marker of ethnicity, and sometimes not: which diacritic of ethnicity

819-420: A more traditional, less dominant role for the women. Hindu deities are more ambiguously gendered than the deities of other world religions. This informs female and males relations, and informs how the differences between males and females are understood. However, in a religious cosmology like Hinduism , which prominently features female and androgynous deities, some gender transgression is allowed. This group

910-519: A preoccupation with scientists, theologians, and the public. Religious institutions asked questions about whether there had been multiple creations of races (polygenesis) and whether God had created lesser races. Many of the foremost scientists of the time took up the idea of racial difference and found that white Europeans were superior. The ethnicity theory was based on the assimilation model. Park outlined four steps to assimilation: contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Instead of attributing

1001-412: A process known as ethnogenesis, a period of several generations of endogamy resulting in common ancestry (which is then sometimes cast in terms of a mythological narrative of a founding figure ); ethnic identity is reinforced by reference to "boundary markers" – characteristics said to be unique to the group which set it apart from other groups. Ethnicity theory argues that race

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1092-537: A role in gendered behavior, the extent of its effects on gender roles is less clear. One hypothesis attributes differences in gender roles to evolution . The sociobiological view argues that men's fitness is increased by being aggressive, allowing them to compete with other men for access to females, as well as by being sexually promiscuous and trying to father as many children as possible. Women are benefited by bonding with infants and caring for children. Sociobiologists argue that these roles are evolutionary and led to

1183-742: A shared cultural heritage , ancestry, origin myth , history , homeland , language , dialect , religion, mythology , folklore , ritual , cuisine , dressing style , art , or physical appearance . Ethnic groups may share a narrow or broad spectrum of genetic ancestry, depending on group identification, with some groups having mixed genetic ancestry. By way of assimilation , acculturation , amalgamation , language shift , intermarriage , adoption , and religious conversion , individuals or groups may over time shift from one ethnic group to another. Ethnic groups may be divided into subgroups or tribes , which over time may become separate ethnic groups themselves due to endogamy or physical isolation from

1274-508: A stand-in for "paganism" in the 18th century, but now came to express the meaning of an "ethnic character" (first recorded 1953). The term ethnic group was first recorded in 1935 and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972. Depending on context, the term nationality may be used either synonymously with ethnicity or synonymously with citizenship (in a sovereign state). The process that results in emergence of an ethnicity

1365-407: A way that predisposes one to engaging in criminal behavior (including juvenile delinquency ). With regard to gender stereotypes , the societal roles and differences in power between men and women are much more strongly indicated than is a biological component. Ideas of appropriate gendered behavior vary among cultures and era, although some aspects receive more widespread attention than others. In

1456-479: Is "the product of social doings of some sort undertaken by men and women whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production." This approach is described by Elisabeth K. Kelan as an "ethnomethodological approach" which analyzes "micro interactions to reveal how the objective and given nature of the world is accomplished," suggesting that gender does not exist until it is empirically perceived and performed through interactions. West and Zimmerman argued that

1547-548: Is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a people of a common language , culture , common sets of ancestry , traditions , society, religion , history, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is sometimes used interchangeably with the term nation , particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism . Ethnicity may be construed as an inherited or societally imposed construct. Ethnic membership tends to be defined by

1638-443: Is a social category and is only one of several factors in determining ethnicity. Other criteria include "religion, language, 'customs', nationality, and political identification". This theory was put forward by sociologist Robert E. Park in the 1920s. It is based on the notion of "culture". This theory was preceded by more than 100 years during which biological essentialism was the dominant paradigm on race. Biological essentialism

1729-423: Is called ethnogenesis , a term in use in ethnological literature since about 1950. The term may also be used with the connotation of something unique and unusually exotic (cf. "an ethnic restaurant", etc.), generally related to cultures of more recent immigrants, who arrived after the dominant population of an area was established. Depending on which source of group identity is emphasized to define membership,

1820-420: Is called ethnogenesis. Members of an ethnic group, on the whole, claim cultural continuities over time, although historians and cultural anthropologists have documented that many of the values, practices, and norms that imply continuity with the past are of relatively recent invention. Ethnic groups can form a cultural mosaic in a society. That could be in a city like New York City or Trieste , but also

1911-428: Is known as the hijras , and has a long tradition of performing in important rituals, such as the birth of sons and weddings. Despite this allowance for transgression, Hindu cultural traditions portray women in contradictory ways. Women's fertility is given great value, but female sexuality is depicted as potentially dangerous and destructive. The institution of marriage influences gender roles, inequality, and change. In

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2002-642: Is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no "ethnics"; there are only "ethnic relations". In the U.S., the OMB says the definition of race as used for the purposes of the US Census is not "scientific or anthropological" and takes into account "social and cultural characteristics as well as ancestry", using "appropriate scientific methodologies" that are not "primarily biological or genetic in reference". Sometimes ethnic groups are subject to prejudicial attitudes and actions by

2093-539: Is not the same thing as gender identity , which refers to the internal sense of one's own gender, whether or not it aligns with categories offered by societal norms. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role. According to social constructionism , gendered behavior is mostly due to social conventions. Theories such as evolutionary psychology disagree with that position. Most children learn to categorize themselves by gender by

2184-442: Is salient depends on whether people are scaling ethnic boundaries up or down, and whether they are scaling them up or down depends generally on the political situation. Kanchan Chandra rejects the expansive definitions of ethnic identity (such as those that include common culture, common language, common history and common territory), choosing instead to define ethnic identity narrowly as a subset of identity categories determined by

2275-431: Is the belief that some races, specifically white Europeans in western versions of the paradigm, are biologically superior and other races, specifically non-white races in western debates, are inherently inferior. This view arose as a way to justify enslavement of African Americans and genocide of Native Americans in a society that was officially founded on freedom for all. This was a notion that developed slowly and came to be

2366-683: The World Values Survey , responders were asked if they thought that wage work should be restricted to only men in the case of shortage in jobs: in Iceland the proportion that agreed with the proposition was 3.6%; while in Egypt it was 94.9%. Attitudes have also varied historically. For example, in Europe, during the Middle Ages, women were commonly associated with roles related to medicine and healing. Because of

2457-458: The Caribbean and South Asia . Max Weber maintained that ethnic groups were künstlich (artificial, i.e. a social construct ) because they were based on a subjective belief in shared Gemeinschaft (community). Secondly, this belief in shared Gemeinschaft did not create the group; the group created the belief. Third, group formation resulted from the drive to monopolize power and status. This

2548-514: The Charismatic and Pentecostal movements have embraced the ordination of women since their founding. Christian " saints ", persons of exceptional holiness of life having attained the beatific vision ( heaven ), can include female saints. Most prominent is Mary, mother of Jesus who is highly revered throughout Christianity, particularly in the Catholic and Orthodox churches where she is considered

2639-450: The New World were multi-ethnic from the onset, as they were formed as colonies imposed on existing indigenous populations. In recent decades, feminist scholars (most notably Nira Yuval-Davis) have drawn attention to the fundamental ways in which women participate in the creation and reproduction of ethnic and national categories. Though these categories are usually discussed as belonging to

2730-597: The United Arab Emirates , non-Muslim Western women can wear crop tops, whereas Muslim women are expected to dress much more modestly when in public. In some Muslim countries, these differences are sometimes even codified in law. In some Muslim-majority countries, even non-Muslim women are expected to follow Muslim female gender norms and Islamic law to a certain extent, such as by covering their hair. (Women visiting from other countries sometimes object to this norm and sometimes decide to comply on pragmatic grounds, in

2821-592: The interactionist approach, gender roles are not fixed but are constantly renegotiated between individuals. Geert Hofstede , a Dutch researcher and social psychologist who dedicated himself to the study of culture, sees culture as "broad patterns of thinking, feeling and acting" in a society In Hofstede's view, most human cultures can themselves be classified as either masculine or feminine. Masculine culture clearly distinguishes between gender roles, directing men to "be assertive, tough, and focused on material success," and women to "be more modest, tender, and concerned with

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2912-448: The sociocultural understanding of gender is distinguished from biological conceptions of sex. In the sociology of gender , the process whereby an individual learns and acquires a gender role in society is termed gender socialization . Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two ( boy / man and girl / woman ), others recognize more. Some non-Western societies have three genders: men, women, and

3003-462: The " Theotokos ", i.e. "Mother of God". Women prominent in Christianity have included contemporaries of Jesus, subsequent theologians, abbesses, mystics, doctors of the church , founders of religious orders, military leaders, monarchs and martyrs, evidencing the variety of roles played by women within the life of Christianity. Paul the Apostle held women in high regard and worthy of prominent positions in

3094-561: The 19th century, the term came to be used in the sense of "peculiar to a tribe, race, people or nation", in a return to the original Greek meaning. The sense of "different cultural groups", and in American English "tribal, racial, cultural or national minority group " arises in the 1930s to 1940s, serving as a replacement of the term race which had earlier taken this sense but was now becoming deprecated due to its association with ideological racism . The abstract ethnicity had been used as

3185-606: The Greeks. Herodotus (8.144.2) gave a famous account of what defined Greek (Hellenic) ethnic identity in his day, enumerating Whether ethnicity qualifies as a cultural universal is to some extent dependent on the exact definition used. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf , do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen ,

3276-518: The United States that the ethnicity theory was exclusively based on the immigration patterns of the white population and did take into account the unique experiences of non-whites in the United States. While Park's theory identified different stages in the immigration process – contact, conflict, struggle, and as the last and best response, assimilation – it did so only for white communities. The ethnicity paradigm neglected

3367-419: The United States, gender roles are communicated by the media, social interaction, and language. Through these platforms society has influenced individuals to fulfill from a young age the stereotypical gender roles in a heterosexual marriage. Roles traditionally distributed according to biological sex are increasingly negotiated by spouses on an equal footing. Ethnicity An ethnicity or ethnic group

3458-994: The added value of being able to describe the commonalities between systems of group identity in both tribal and modern societies. Cohen also suggested that claims concerning "ethnic" identity (like earlier claims concerning "tribal" identity) are often colonialist practices and effects of the relations between colonized peoples and nation-states. According to Paul James , formations of identity were often changed and distorted by colonization, but identities are not made out of nothing: Categorizations about identity, even when codified and hardened into clear typologies by processes of colonization, state formation or general modernizing processes, are always full of tensions and contradictions. Sometimes these contradictions are destructive, but they can also be creative and positive. Social scientists have thus focused on how, when, and why different markers of ethnic identity become salient. Thus, anthropologist Joan Vincent observed that ethnic boundaries often have

3549-673: The age of three. From birth, in the course of gender socialization, children learn gender stereotypes and roles from their parents and environment. Traditionally, boys learn to manipulate their physical and social environment through physical strength or dexterity, while girls learn to present themselves as objects to be viewed. Social constructionists argue that differences between male and female behavior are better attributable to gender-segregated children's activities than to any essential, natural, physiological, or genetic predisposition. As an aspect of role theory , gender role theory "treats these differing distributions of women and men into roles as

3640-449: The belief of common descent. Jóhanna Birnir similarly defines ethnicity as "group self-identification around a characteristic that is very difficult or even impossible to change, such as language, race, or location." Different approaches to understanding ethnicity have been used by different social scientists when trying to understand the nature of ethnicity as a factor in human life and society. As Jonathan M. Hall observes, World War II

3731-724: The church, though he was careful not to encourage disregard for the New Testament household codes , also known as New Testament Domestic Codes or Haustafelen , of Greco-Roman law in the first century. According to Dhami and Sheikh, gender roles in Muslim countries are centered on the importance of the family unit, which is viewed as the basis of a balanced and healthy society. Islamic views on gender roles and family are traditionally conservative. Many Muslim-majority countries, most prominently Saudi Arabia , have interpretations of religious doctrine regarding gender roles embedded in their laws. In

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3822-573: The context of European colonial expansion, when mercantilism and capitalism were promoting global movements of populations at the same time that state boundaries were being more clearly and rigidly defined. In the 19th century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations". Nation-states , however, invariably include populations who have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Members of excluded groups, consequently, will either demand inclusion based on equality or seek autonomy, sometimes even to

3913-422: The course of individual life histories." In 1978, anthropologist Ronald Cohen claimed that the identification of "ethnic groups" in the usage of social scientists often reflected inaccurate labels more than indigenous realities: ... the named ethnic identities we accept, often unthinkingly, as basic givens in the literature are often arbitrarily, or even worse inaccurately, imposed. In this way, he pointed to

4004-526: The cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term "race" is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term "race" altogether and speak of "ethnic groups". In 1982, anthropologist David Craig Griffith summed up forty years of ethnographic research, arguing that racial and ethnic categories are symbolic markers for different ways people from different parts of

4095-447: The distant past. Perspectives that developed after the 1960s increasingly viewed ethnic groups as social constructs , with identity assigned by societal rules. The term ethnic is ultimately derived from the Greek ethnos , through its adjectival form ethnikos , loaned into Latin as ethnicus . The inherited English language term for this concept is folk , used alongside

4186-452: The distinctions of ethnicity and race that function to set off categories of workers from one another. It is, nevertheless, the process of labor mobilization under capitalism that imparts to these distinctions their effective values. According to Wolf, racial categories were constructed and incorporated during the period of European mercantile expansion , and ethnic groupings during the period of capitalist expansion . Writing in 1977 about

4277-522: The domination of women by men, especially in agricultural societies". According to Eagly et al., the consequences of gender roles and stereotypes are sex-typed social behavior because roles and stereotypes are both socially-shared descriptive norms and prescriptive norms. Judith Butler , in works such as Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender , contends that being female is not "natural" and that it appears natural only through repeated performances of gender; these performances, in turn, reproduce and define

4368-452: The establishment of traditional gender roles, with women in the domestic sphere and men dominant in every other area. However, this view pre-assumes a view of nature that is contradicted by the fact that women engage in hunting in 79% of modern hunter-gatherer societies. However, an attempted verification of this study found "that multiple methodological failures all bias their results in the same direction...their analysis does not contradict

4459-530: The extent of complete political separation in their nation-state. Under these conditions   when people moved from one state to another, or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries – ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation but lived in another state. In the 1920s, Estonia introduced a flexible system of ethnicity/nationality self-choice for its citizens, which included Estonians Russians, Baltic Germans and Jews. Multi-ethnic states can be

4550-410: The extreme what these days seems extraordinary for its complete denial of the notion of natural inclination." They concluded that gonads , hormones , and chromosomes did not automatically determine a child's gender role. Among the many terms Money coined was gender role, which he defined in a seminal 1955 paper as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having

4641-414: The fact that identification of an ethnic group by outsiders, e.g. anthropologists, may not coincide with the self-identification of the members of that group. He also described that in the first decades of usage, the term ethnicity had often been used in lieu of older terms such as "cultural" or "tribal" when referring to smaller groups with shared cultural systems and shared heritage, but that "ethnicity" had

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4732-518: The fallen monarchy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the United States. Current topics are in particular social and cultural differentiation, multilingualism, competing identity offers, multiple cultural identities and the formation of Salad bowl and melting pot . Ethnic groups differ from other social groups, such as subcultures , interest groups or social classes , because they emerge and change over historical periods (centuries) in

4823-792: The first century church). This is especially true in marriage and in formal ministry positions within certain Christian denominations, churches, and parachurch organizations . Many leadership roles in the organized church have been restricted to males. In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, only men may serve as priests or deacons, and in senior leadership positions such as pope , patriarch , and bishop . Women may serve as abbesses . Some mainstream Protestant denominations are beginning to relax their longstanding constraints on ordaining women to be ministers, though some large groups are tightening their constraints in reaction. Many subsets of

4914-580: The following types of (often mutually overlapping) groups can be identified: In many cases, more than one aspect determines membership: for instance, Armenian ethnicity can be defined by Armenian citizenship, having Armenian heritage, native use of the Armenian language , or membership of the Armenian Apostolic Church . Ethnography begins in classical antiquity ; after early authors like Anaximander and Hecataeus of Miletus , Herodotus laid

5005-672: The foundation of both historiography and ethnography of the ancient world c.  480 BC . The Greeks had developed a concept of their own ethnicity, which they grouped under the name of Hellenes . Although there were exceptions, such as Macedonia, which was ruled by nobility in a way that was not typically Greek, and Sparta, which had an unusual ruling class, the ancient Greeks generally enslaved only non-Greeks due to their strong belief in ethnonationalism. The Greeks sometimes believed that even their lowest citizens were superior to any barbarian. In his Politics 1.2–7; 3.14, Aristotle even described barbarians as natural slaves in contrast to

5096-558: The genes. Examples of various approaches are primordialism, essentialism, perennialism, constructivism, modernism, and instrumentalism. Ethnicity is an important means by which people may identify with a larger group. Many social scientists, such as anthropologists Fredrik Barth and Eric Wolf , do not consider ethnic identity to be universal. They regard ethnicity as a product of specific kinds of inter-group interactions, rather than an essential quality inherent to human groups. The process that results in emergence of such identification

5187-459: The interest of their own safety , such as " modest " dress codes which failing to abide by risk being perceived as a prostitute .) Islamic prophet Muhammad described the high status of mothers in both of the major hadith collections ( Bukhari and Muslim). One famous account is: "A man asked the Prophet: 'Whom should I honor most?' The Prophet replied: 'Your mother'. 'And who comes next?' asked

5278-433: The kernel of a nation which must be defended in times of conflict, or in iconic figures such as Britannia or Marianne . Ethnicity is used as a matter of cultural identity of a group, often based on shared ancestry, language, and cultural traditions, while race is applied as a taxonomic grouping, based on physical similarities among groups. Race is a more controversial subject than ethnicity, due to common political use of

5369-587: The latinate people since the late Middle English period. In Early Modern English and until the mid-19th century, ethnic was used to mean heathen or pagan (in the sense of disparate "nations" which did not yet participate in the Christian ecumene ), as the Septuagint used ta ethne 'the nations' to translate the Hebrew goyim "the foreign nations, non-Hebrews, non-Jews". The Greek term in early antiquity ( Homeric Greek ) could refer to any large group,

5460-422: The man. The Prophet replied: 'Your mother'. 'And who comes next?' asked the man. The Prophet replied: 'Your mother!'. 'And who comes next?' asked the man. The Prophet replied: 'Your father'" The Qur'an prescribes that the status of a woman should be nearly as high as that of a man. How gender roles are honored is largely cultural. While some cultures encourage men and women to take on the same roles, others promote

5551-477: The marginalized status of people of color in the United States to their inherent biological inferiority, he attributed it to their failure to assimilate into American culture. They could become equal if they abandoned their inferior cultures. Michael Omi and Howard Winant 's theory of racial formation directly confronts both the premises and the practices of ethnicity theory. They argue in Racial Formation in

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5642-479: The modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state system in the 17th century. They culminated in the rise of "nation-states" in which the presumptive boundaries of the nation coincided (or ideally coincided) with state boundaries. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation , developed in

5733-598: The non-material quality of life, for children and for the weak. Feminine cultures, on the other hand, define relatively overlapping social roles for the sexes, in which, in particular, men need not be ambitious or competitive but may go for a different quality of life than material success; men may respect whatever is small, weak, and slow. In feminine cultures, modesty and relationships are important characteristics. This differs from masculine cultures, where self-enhancement leads to self-esteem. Masculine cultures are individualistic and feminine cultures are more collective because of

5824-551: The parent group. Conversely, formerly separate ethnicities can merge to form a panethnicity and may eventually merge into one single ethnicity . Whether through division or amalgamation, the formation of a separate ethnic identity is referred to as ethnogenesis . Although both organic and performative criteria characterise ethnic groups, debate in the past has dichotomised between primordialism and constructivism. Earlier 20th-century "Primordialists" viewed ethnic groups as real phenomena whose distinct characteristics have endured since

5915-437: The personal relationships a person enters, and how they behave within those relationships. Although gender roles have evolved and expanded, they traditionally keep women in the "private" sphere, and men in the "public" sphere. Various groups, most notably feminist movements, have led efforts to change aspects of prevailing gender roles that they believe are oppressive , inaccurate, and sexist . A gender role , also known as

6006-477: The primary origin of sex-differentiated social behavior, [and posits that] their impact on behavior is mediated by psychological and social processes." According to Gilbert Herdt , gender roles arose from correspondent inference, meaning that general labor division was extended to gender roles. Social constructionists consider gender roles to be hierarchical and patriarchal. The term patriarchy, according to researcher Andrew Cherlin , defines "a social order based on

6097-450: The problem of racism became the sole responsibility of already disadvantaged communities. It was assumed that if a Black or Latino community was not "making it" by the standards that had been set by whites, it was because that community did not hold the right values or beliefs, or were stubbornly resisting dominant norms because they did not want to fit in. Omi and Winant's critique of ethnicity theory explains how looking to cultural defect as

6188-433: The public, political sphere, they are upheld within the private, family sphere to a great extent. It is here that women act not just as biological reproducers but also as "cultural carriers", transmitting knowledge and enforcing behaviors that belong to a specific collectivity. Women also often play a significant symbolic role in conceptions of nation or ethnicity, for example in the notion that "women and children" constitute

6279-465: The quality of life." Feminine cultures tolerate overlapping gender roles, and instruct that "both men and women are supposed to be modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life." Hofstede's Feminine and Masculine Culture Dimensions states: Masculine cultures expect men to be assertive, ambitious and competitive, to strive for material success, and to respect whatever is big, strong, and fast. Masculine cultures expect women to serve and care for

6370-567: The result of inherited traits and tendencies. With Weber's introduction of the idea of ethnicity as a social construct, race and ethnicity became more divided from each other. In 1950, the UNESCO statement " The Race Question ", signed by some of the internationally renowned scholars of the time (including Ashley Montagu , Claude Lévi-Strauss , Gunnar Myrdal , Julian Huxley , etc.), said: National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and

6461-483: The result of two opposite events, either the recent creation of state borders at variance with traditional tribal territories, or the recent immigration of ethnic minorities into a former nation-state. Examples for the first case are found throughout Africa , where countries created during decolonization inherited arbitrary colonial borders, but also in European countries such as Belgium or United Kingdom . Examples for

6552-456: The rise of witch-hunts across Europe and the institutionalization of medicine, these roles became exclusively associated with men. In the last few decades, these roles have become largely gender-neutral in Western society . Vern Bullough stated that homosexual communities are generally more tolerant of switching gender roles. For instance, someone with a masculine voice, a five o'clock shadow (or

6643-581: The second case are countries such as Netherlands , which were relatively ethnically homogeneous when they attained statehood but have received significant immigration in the 17th century and even more so in the second half of the 20th century. States such as the United Kingdom , France and Switzerland comprised distinct ethnic groups from their formation and have likewise experienced substantial immigration, resulting in what has been termed " multicultural " societies, especially in large cities. The states of

6734-424: The sense of Max Weber's ideal types (an exaggerated and simplified version of a phenomenon, used for analytical purposes) rather than how they appear in reality. Model A described a total separation of male and female roles, while Model B described the complete dissolution of gender roles. The model is consciously a simplification; individuals' actual behavior usually lies somewhere between these poles. According to

6825-516: The significance of personal relationships. 'The dominant values in a masculine society are achievement and success; the dominant values in a feminine society are caring for others and quality of life'. "In the 1950s, John Money and his colleagues took up the study of intersex individuals, who, Money realized, 'would provide invaluable material for the comparative study for bodily form and physiology, rearing, and psychosexual orientation'." "Money and his colleagues used their own studies to state in

6916-420: The source of inequality ignores the "concrete sociopolitical dynamics within which racial phenomena operate in the U.S." It prevents critical examination of the structural components of racism and encourages a "benign neglect" of social inequality. In some cases, especially those involving transnational migration or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following

7007-407: The state or its constituents. In the 20th century, people began to argue that conflicts among ethnic groups or between members of an ethnic group and the state can and should be resolved in one of two ways. Some, like Jürgen Habermas and Bruce Barry, have argued that the legitimacy of modern states must be based on a notion of political rights of autonomous individual subjects. According to this view,

7098-441: The state should not acknowledge ethnic, national or racial identity but rather instead enforce political and legal equality of all individuals. Others, like Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka , argue that the notion of the autonomous individual is itself a cultural construct. According to this view, states must recognize ethnic identity and develop processes through which the particular needs of ethnic groups can be accommodated within

7189-468: The status of boy or man, girl or woman." In recent years, the majority of Money's theories regarding the importance of socialization in the determination of gender have come under intense criticism, especially in connection with the inaccurate reporting of success in the "John/Joan" case, later revealed to be David Reimer . Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman developed an interactionist perspective on gender beyond its construction of "roles." For them, gender

7280-742: The studies have been identified. A study on 1950s American teenage girls who had been exposed to androgenic steroids by their mothers in utero exhibited more traditionally masculine behavior, such as being more concerned about their future career than marriage, wearing pants, and not being interested in jewelry. Sociologist Linda L. Lindsey critiqued the notion that gender roles are a result of prenatal hormone exposure, saying that while hormones may explain sex differences like sexual orientation and gender identity, they "cannot account for gender differences in other roles such as nurturing, love, and criminal behavior". By contrast, some research indicates that both neurobiological and social risk factors can interact in

7371-512: The study of ethnicity was dominated by two distinct debates until recently. According to Eriksen , these debates have been superseded, especially in anthropology , by scholars' attempts to respond to increasingly politicized forms of self-representation by members of different ethnic groups and nations. This is in the context of debates over multiculturalism in countries, such as the United States and Canada, which have large immigrant populations from many different cultures, and post-colonialism in

7462-524: The term in social studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Barth went further than Weber in stressing the constructed nature of ethnicity. To Barth, ethnicity was perpetually negotiated and renegotiated by both external ascription and internal self-identification. Barth's view is that ethnic groups are not discontinuous cultural isolates or logical a priori to which people naturally belong. He wanted to part with anthropological notions of cultures as bounded entities, and ethnicity as primordialist bonds, replacing it with

7553-446: The term. Ramón Grosfoguel (University of California, Berkeley) argues that "racial/ethnic identity" is one concept and concepts of race and ethnicity cannot be used as separate and autonomous categories. Before Weber (1864–1920), race and ethnicity were primarily seen as two aspects of the same thing. Around 1900 and before, the primordialist understanding of ethnicity predominated: cultural differences between peoples were seen as being

7644-488: The traditional categories of sex and/or gender. Working in the United States in 1955, Talcott Parsons developed a model of the nuclear family , which at that place and time was the prevalent family structure. The model compared a traditional contemporaneous view of gender roles with a more liberal view. The Parsons model was used to contrast and illustrate extreme positions on gender roles, i.e., gender roles described in

7735-406: The usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States , Wallman noted The term "ethnic" popularly connotes "[race]" in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, "[race]" most commonly means color, and "ethnics" are the descendants of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. "[Ethnic]"

7826-806: The use of "role" to describe gender expectations conceals the production of gender through everyday activities. Furthermore, they stated that roles are situated identities, such as "nurse" and "student," which are developed as the situation demands, while gender is a master identity with no specific site or organizational context. For them, "conceptualizing gender as a role makes it difficult to assess its influence on other roles and reduces its explanatory usefulness in discussions of power and inequality." West and Zimmerman consider gender an individual production that reflects and constructs interactional and institutional gender expectations. Historically, gender roles have been largely attributed to biological differences in men and women. Although research indicates that biology plays

7917-448: The ways in which race can complicate a community's interactions with social and political structures, especially upon contact. Assimilation – shedding the particular qualities of a native culture for the purpose of blending in with a host culture – did not work for some groups as a response to racism and discrimination, though it did for others. Once the legal barriers to achieving equality had been dismantled,

8008-620: The wide body of empirical evidence for gendered divisions of labor in foraging societies". Another hypothesis attributes differences in gender roles to prenatal exposure to hormones . Early research examining the effect of biology on gender roles by John Money and Anke Ehrhardt primarily focused on girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), resulting in higher-than-normal prenatal exposure to androgens . Their research found that girls with CAH exhibited tomboy -like behavior, were less interested in dolls, and were less likely to make-believe as parents. A number of methodological problems with

8099-442: The world have been incorporated into a global economy: The opposing interests that divide the working classes are further reinforced through appeals to "racial" and "ethnic" distinctions. Such appeals serve to allocate different categories of workers to rungs on the scale of labor markets, relegating stigmatized populations to the lower levels and insulating the higher echelons from competition from below. Capitalism did not create all

8190-483: Was a turning point in ethnic studies. The consequences of Nazi racism discouraged essentialist interpretations of ethnic groups and race. Ethnic groups came to be defined as social rather than biological entities. Their coherence was attributed to shared myths, descent, kinship , a common place of origin, language, religion, customs, and national character. So, ethnic groups are conceived as mutable rather than stable, constructed in discursive practices rather than written in

8281-407: Was contrary to the prevailing naturalist belief of the time, which held that socio-cultural and behavioral differences between peoples stemmed from inherited traits and tendencies derived from common descent, then called "race". Another influential theoretician of ethnicity was Fredrik Barth , whose "Ethnic Groups and Boundaries" from 1969 has been described as instrumental in spreading the usage of

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