Accepted Gender Roles Research Articles

Gender Differences in Secondary School Students’ Achievement in Chemistry in Samburu County, Kenya

The purpose of this study was to investigate the gender differences in secondary school students’ achievement in chemistry. In addition, the study sought to identify the factors that contribute to gender differences in chemistry achievement to in order to enhance the provision of equal opportunities for the learning of chemistry and all other sciences in general to both boys and girls. Cross-Sectional study design under the descriptive survey research was used. The target population of the study comprised of all the secondary school chemistry students in both public and private secondary schools in Samburu county. The accessible population were all the form three chemistry students in the county. A sample of 286 students was selected from a population of 1,238 using stratified and simple random sampling techniques. Students’ Chemistry Achievement Test (SCAT) and Students’ Gender Interview Schedule (SGIS) were used to collect data. The data collected was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The statistics derived included the analysis of percentages, mean, standard deviation, students’ T-Test scores and Chi-Square Test (x2 test) used to establish the relationship between culturally accepted gender roles and achievement in chemistry. The findings show that there was a statistically significant gender difference in chemistry achievement in favour of boys. As a result, boys’ schools performed better than both girls’ and co-educational schools. Boys had a high affinity and interest towards chemistry than girls. Also the culturally accepted gender roles had an effect on chemistry achievement. It is recommended that the Ministry of Education should initiate in-service programmes for teachers in science courses emphasizing on relevant scientific skills to empower teachers to provide learning opportunities that would reduce the gender differences and the effect of cultural factors known to enhance gender differences in the learning and achievement in chemistry. Curriculum developers and policy makers need to develop curriculum materials that would help to reduce the gender gap in learning and achievement.

“Beauty Isn’t Prerequisite for Girl Marines”: Images of Female Marines during World War II

Quite often, representations of the Marine Corps during World War II included gendered elements that reflected the institution’s beliefs about men and women, their place in society, and acceptable gender roles. The U.S. military has long struggled with negotiating gender, and the hypermasculine nature of the military—and the emphasis the Marine Corps, in particular, placed on maintaining ideal masculinity—influenced the relationship between masculinity and femininity for servicemembers, and the images produced by and about the Marine Corps impacted the appearance of gender norms in the military context. Women Marines’ presence both challenged and reinforced the Corps’ hypermasculine reputation and image as warriors by means of the representation of women’s bodies and labor.

THE ATTITUDES TOWARDS WOMEN IN THE MARY PLAY AND THE ROARING GIRL

Women’s marital status has always been a controversial issue for the public opinion over the centuries because a woman’s gender almost always brings her certain limitations and expectations. The gender norms imposed on people and the stereotyped gender roles usually determine the attitude towards women in many countries. This study aims to examine two dramatic works “The Mary Play” and “The Roaring Girl” which show the attitude towards women both in the Medieval and in the Early Modern England. The attitude towards women in terms of gender norms and the concept of marriage are analysed in both plays, and it is seen that the accepted gender roles in these two plays are so similar to each other that the femininity and the marital status of both female characters are at the center of public concern. Yet, there is a certain attitude in both plays contradictory to the patriarchal mindset of femininity, marriage and motherhood, which can be regarded as a pioneer of feminism that will emerge a few centuries later.

Empowerment and autonomy in rural women: case study of the municipality of Chivatá, Boyacá, Colombia

There is a disparity between men and women, which is conditioned by the accepted gender roles within the culture. It carries a disadvantage for women in political, economic and social terms in gene...

Recasting the nation: transforming heroes of the Soviet Union into symbols of Kazakhstani patriotism

ABSTRACT In 1997 a monument dedicated to Heroes of the Soviet Union Aliya Moldagulova and Manshuk Mametova was unveiled on the former site of the monument to Lenin in central Almaty. This case study investigates the valorization of these Soviet-era World War II heroes in independent Kazakhstan, and argues that the Kazakhstani state has recast these heroes as significant figures in the official centuries-long history of Kazakhstan. Incorporating and commemorating the Soviet experience of World War II as part of the narrative of an independent state provides an avenue for legitimating Kazakhstani nation-building efforts. Incorporating regionally important stories of women heroes through monuments and commemorative activities demonstrates the symbolic and instrumental roles that monuments in public spaces play in reinforcing officially acceptable gender roles and in structuring power relations between the regions and the centre in Kazakhstan and between Kazakhstan and Russia.

“I Want to be a Leader, But Men Are Better Than Women in Leadership Positions”

Abstract This research paper investigates female perceptions of female leadership in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where, particularly recently, state feminism has supported women’s occupation of leadership positions. It thus explores how state feminism’s portrayal of the ideal woman in leadership has impacted Emirati women’s perceptions of female leaders. A survey comprising 350 female Emirati students was undertaken, and results were supported by interviews. Findings suggest that although 93 percent of respondents “wanted to” or “probably wanted to” be leaders, they nevertheless endorsed “sexist” stereotypes and legitimizing myths. These contradictions are due, most likely, to ambivalent messages disseminated by the state and by society at large about female leaders. This research postulates that, while women have gained more agency in the public sphere through occupying leadership positions, their own perceptions and portrayals of acceptable gender roles are complex and ambivalent.

What makes a man a “real man”?: Perspectives regarding masculinities and gender roles among young men in Turkey

ABSTRACTAnalyzing 5 focus group interviews with 46 college-going men (18–25 years), this qualitative study specifically explores perspectives of young Turkish men about meanings and conceptualizations of masculinities and gender roles. Our study finds that they viewed masculinity as demonstrating and maintaining superior, tough, self-sufficient, exteriors. Homosocial practices, including sexual objectification, competition, and homophobia, are important for the maintenance of male dominance and masculinity. Our respondents felt that men should avoid housework so as not to be identified as feminine or ridiculed by their families or peers. In this qualitative study, we illustrate how masculinities and gender roles are shaped among college-going young men with specific examples from the interviews. The study revealed that, societal pressure stemming from cultural traditions and Islam has a significant influence on these men’s understanding of acceptable gender roles and masculinity. Based on these findings, we propose strategies to reformulate a healthy gender identity and to support young men at individual, community, and societal levels.

The Effect of Perceived Discrimination on Gender Role Conflict Among Men Engaged in A-typical Occupations: The Moderating Role of Work Autonomy

Empirical research suggests that gendered job-segregation have effects on men in the workplace consequent upon bias evaluations stemming from social norms regarding acceptable gender roles. These biases are capable of inducing workplace stressors that may affect the psychological well being of men engaged in female-dominated occupations. This study investigates the moderating role of work autonomy in the relationship between perceived gender discrimination and gender role conflict for men in atypical occupations. A cross-sectional survey method was used to collect data from a sample of 150 men in the occupations of nursing, librarian, and primary school teaching, and a hierarchical regression test analyzed hypotheses. Regression analysis demonstrated that perceived discrimination and work autonomy were significant predictors of gender role conflict (β = .60, p < .001), and β = -.62, p < .001, respectively). A moderated regression analysis was also conducted to test the assumption that job autonomy moderates the relationship between perceiving a discriminatory work environment and workers’ gender role conflict. The analysis indicated that 79% of the variation in the dependent variable could be explained by the main effects and the interaction effects, F (4, 145) =140.58, p < .05). This interaction effect, although significant, accounted for a minimal incremental effect above and beyond the direct effects of perceived gender discrimination and work autonomy (ΔR2 = .008, F (1, 145) = 5.48, p < .05). Research implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Talking Time in Children’s Adventure Fiction: Which Gender Controls the Discourse?

It is nowadays widely agreed that gender identity is socially and culturally constructed. This construction is enabled by parental and other adult models, parental treatment, peer pressure and the media. Today television has a powerful impact, but in the mid-twentieth century books were more influential for many children. Did popular children’s fiction of this period merely reflect society’s bipolar gender constructs, or did it in any way challenge these? Whereas folklinguistics would suggest that females are more verbose than males, sociolinguists have found the opposite to be true in many contexts; public discourse such as meetings and the classroom tends to be dominated by males. There have been a number of studies of verbosity in real-life contexts; this cross-disciplinary study of four children’s adventure books examines the discourse to see who is given the most ‘talking time’. It was hypothesised that the authors would be influenced either by the folklinguistic view and give their girls long speech turns, or by the actual discourse they themselves experienced and give the boys the lion’s share. The actual picture that emerges is far more complex, suggesting that while some writers did indeed reflect and support the accepted gender roles of the society in which they wrote, others created discourse which interwove gender, age and personality, with personality the most powerful factor in determining dominance.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS IN INDIAN PARALLEL FILMS: A STUDY OF HOMOPHOBIA IN INDIAN SOCIETY

Abstract. The paper attempts to study the presence of homophobia prevalent in Indian society and its representation onscreen through parallel films. It also studies the relevance of these films, which are comparable to ethnographic films in terms of selection of their content and the intent of the filmmakers, in attempting to affect a change in the society for the betterment of minority groups and victims. While doing so, the parallel Indian film Aligarh has been taken as a case study which is based on the life and mysterious death of Professor Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras. The public uproar and unofficial ban and violence against the film during its release provides us with useful anthropological insight into the mindset of a large number of people who resort to violence in the face of change from the accepted and widespread societal norms. Keywords: gender roles, homosexuality, morals, culture, derogatory caricatures, censorship, societal pressure 1. Introduction In few words, gender is an analytical concept that promotes the understanding of diverse phenomena from different fields in the context of human sciences (Madureira 2007). But in many societies across the world, especially where people are averse to same-sex relations, gender is increasingly emerging as a construct forced upon an individual by the norms of the society. The dimorphism found among species has spawned and reinforced the traditional notion of sexes by proposing and strengthening the roles attributed to sexes. So strong has been the identification of the male and female attributes with the biological gender that the alternative sexualities have been completely ignored or looked at with derision throughout history. Homophobia or the fear of relations between individuals of the same sex stems from a strong identification with the accepted gender roles in a world where any deviation from convention is looked at with suspicion and derision. Only recently has the world opened to the rights of LGBTQ community and that too in fits and starts. Today, gender is not just the set of physical attributes one was born with, but how one feels inside. In the present times studies on gender are garnering a lot of interest, as evident from the numerous works focusing on this area. In opposition to abstract conceptions about human beings, gender and sexuality studies stress the centrality of culture and power in the processes of construction of multiple social identities (Madureira 2007). Gender, in its early definitions meant the biological attributes which identified a person as male or female. The notion of gender by birth and psycho-social conditioning of individual in keeping with the accepted gender roles meant that an individual had to fit in within the traits visualized by the society as belonging to the male or female sex. There was no question of alternate sexualities and no space for people who felt trapped within the biological shell which they were not comfortable with. The association of behavioral attributes with the physical gender resulted in gender being seen as a synthesis of the mental and physical being and created fixed patterns of accepted gender roles. Over time they have become integral to our existence and any deviance from this norm unsettles us. Till a few decades ago, individuals had no choice but to struggle to fit in with their biological gender. Homosexuality had been a diagnostic category in the DSM since the manual's first edition in 1952, and its classification as a disease was rooted in a nineteenth century medical model (Bayer 1987, Chauncey 1982-1983). The people with alternate sexualities were considered as being mentally sick and were considered sociopaths for a long time. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association Board of Directors voted to remove homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), declaring that a same-sex orientation is not inherently associated with psychopathology (Bayer 1987, Minton 2002). …

A Good Soldier and a Good Mother: New Conditions and New Roles in the Nagorno-Karabakh War

This article dedicated to the study of women’s behaviour in times of war is based on several interviews with “Satenik”, a woman who served as a senior lieutenant and head of a medical battalion during the war in Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. The article explores the social trajectory and the reasons that led her to go to the front; it reflects on the difficulties faced by a woman at the front, the relations to her fellow soldiers and the consequences of her confrontation to violence; it shows somehow paradoxically that it was easier for here to find her place at the front, when social norms were temporarily lifted, than after the war. The articles concludes with a reflection on gender and national identity through the experience of those rare women who deviated from generally accepted gender roles.

A Marriage of Equals?

This article discusses the post-Nicene passio Chrysanthi et Dariae (BHL 1787-1787a-1788) and aims to demonstrate that this text gives evidence of more literary subtlety than the late antique passions usually get credit for. To underpin this claim, we analyze the characterization of the passion's protagonists Chrysanthus and Daria. The characterization reveals, we contend, how the passio takes different, ambiguous approaches to traditional gender roles. On the one hand, one detects a movement towards sexual symmetry: both in the intellectual and in the sexual realm, Chrysanthus and Dania become equals. On the other hand, the movement towards sexual symmetry does not preclude the evocation of traditional gender roles in this passion: when it comes to instruction in the faith, the accepted gender roles prevail.

TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYET BAĞLAMINDA HEMŞİRELİK BÖLÜMÜNDE ÖĞRENİM GÖREN ERKEK ÖĞRENCİLERİN MESLEĞE YÖNELİK ALGILARI

The socio-cultural separation and of sexual roles and their categorization by the society is an interest of sociology. In social field, different means are implied to sex. Professions are shaped upon gender patterns and separations that are implied upon them by the society. In nearly every society, professions are separated by according to accepted gender roles. To describe female dominated jobs, the term pink collar has been used since seventies. Nursery is one of these professions and it is known as a women profession in many societies. In our study, in context of gender, it is tried to determine the profession perception of male students who study nursery. To this purpose, 17 male nursery students from different classes in Nevsehir Haci Bektas Veli University, Semra and Vefa Kucuk College of Health were interviewed deeply. The nursery profession which is usually chosen because of economic anxiety, is widely seen as a woman profession. It is concluded that the interviewed people believe that male nurses will only be useful in conditions where physical force is needed

Instantiating Vision at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary

This article examines the how the educational ideals of Mary Lyon, founder of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, were instantiated in the built environment of the seminary she founded in the early nineteenth century. It is an exploration of how Lyon's vision of place contributed to the creation and transformation of gendered lives for middle‐ and lower‐class women from rural New England. While working within the restraints of a male‐dominated social and economic climate, Lyon both conforms to and resists the accepted gender roles that expected women to be subservient and obedient. Intent on changing the nature of women's educational and professional lives, Lyon refashioned notions of what it meant to be dependent yet dedicated to developing a life of the mind. Specific attention is given to how the built environment of the seminary served to further inculcate Lyon's belief in order, routine, and familial harmony all in the service of educating young women in preparation for both domestic and professional lives.

For the Honour of the School: Class in the Girls’ School Story

This article explores the constructions of class in British girls’ school stories. Feminist scholarship has, to some extent, reclaimed the school story, pointing to the widening of acceptable gender roles for female characters in girls’ school stories, compared to their counterparts in mixed-gender stories, and indeed real life. While the limitations of this middle/upper class milieu have been noted, they are less often explored. I use readings of Bourdieu as applied to femininities by scholars such as McRobbie and Skeggs to examine how the lived experience of class can trouble the status quo. School stories often limit encounters with working-class characters to servants, recipients of patronage or straightforward threats. However, in Brent-Dyer’s A Problem for the Chalet School (1956) a working-class character enters the school on her own terms. Her presence sparks the reaffirmation of the expectations for successful upper-class femininity.

Gender-specific HIV policies and programmes at South African workplaces

The purpose of this article is to explore how legislation and common law can be creatively interpreted in the light of the Constitution, soft law and international law so as to create legal duties on the part of employers to implement gender-specific policies and practices in the fight against HIV/AIDS, thereby helping to achieve equality and dignity. However, it is acknowledged that the law, even if imaginatively interpreted in the interests of equality and dignity, cannot alone bring about these ideals. Sexual, cultural and economic transformation can only be achieved in the light of a profound understanding of the fundamental causes of gender inequality so that pro- active strategies to eliminate them can be devised and implemented. Fundamental rights such as the right to equality and the right to dignity can form the foundational basis upon which to ground these strategies and programmes. This foundation must serve as a premise for a society where altered roles related to gender can be learned by society in general. Since commonly accepted expectations with regard to male and female behaviour are of prime importance in the spread of HIV/Aids, changes in these accepted gender roles is where the potential for the elimination of the spread of HIV/AIDS lies.

Des femmes en littérature (review)

Reviewed by: Des femmes en littérature Anne Hajek Reid, Martine . Des femmes en littérature. Paris: Bélin, 2010. Pp. 331. ISBN: 9782701155661. In Des femmes en littérature, Martine Reid seeks to contribute to our scholarly understanding of the gendered nature of literature written by women in France. She reminds us that French women have been both writing and publishing since the Middle Ages. Their existence as producers of literature is not in question. In fact, Reid points to a large body of scholarly work devoted to the study of French women's writing. Nonetheless, she cautions that women's place in overarching descriptions of literary history and in collective memory is still problematic: regardless of the large numbers of texts they produced, relatively few women writers are typically represented today in university curricula or in scholarly reflections on literature. Reid explains this absence by hypothesizing a systematic erasure of women's literary contributions. She argues that during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, male critics capitalized on widely-accepted ideas of gender to marginalize progressively and eventually erase the works of women authors from literary history. Reid adopts a two-fold corrective approach to re-thinking women's place in the literary historical record. She first explores the reception of women authors after the Revolution and then analyzes a variety of post-revolutionary women's novels. Throughout the text, she convincingly argues that women's writing is always "singulière;" each text should be approached as a unique literary creation, not reductively categorized under a monolithic label. The first part of her book, "Discours," aims to sketch a history of the reception of post-revolutionary women authors and to highlight the obstacles facing them as they embarked upon literary careers. In her first chapter, "Défenses et illustrations," Constance Pipelet, Germaine de Staël, and Félicité de Genlis serve as examples of the various ways in which women writers defended their own involvement in literary pursuits given the social constraints of gender. In chapter two, "Bas-bleus," Reid turns her attention to pictorial representations of women writers in the nineteenth century. She examines criticism of the bas-bleu in the illustrations of Jules Janin, Frédéric Soulié, and Honoré Daumier. For her, these images represent commonly held perceptions of women writers as a threat to social order because of their perceived transgression or rejection of socially accepted gender roles, especially those of wife and mother. By creating laughable images of women authors, caricaturists took the first step in what Reid views as a process aimed at erasing women's literary contributions. The third chapter, "À Titre d'hommage," examines works by Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine to illustrate further the nineteenth century's growing hostility toward women's literary involvement. At the end of part one, Reid turns to the field of literary history, to demonstrate definitively the existence of a slow process aimed at expunging women writers from the French literary record. She shows how, by the end of the nineteenth century, [End Page 329] women writers had been successfully relegated to the margins of literary history. For Reid, the effects of the process are felt even today: although a significant number of Anglophone and Francophone scholars have excavated and explored many forgotten works, women authors have been only weakly integrated into the broad scope of literary history and have yet to occupy their true place. In the second half of her book, "Fictions," Reid turns to literary texts, primarily novels, to illustrate the ways in which gender affected women's literary production. By using gender as a critical lens, Reid hopes to begin the process of fully integrating women's writing into the literary historical record. Before beginning her in-depth textual analyses, she explores the implications of publication for women. Then, she examines and questions the common association of women with the novel, suggesting that persistent association of women with the genre was yet another effort to keep women on the margins of literature. In chapters seven through twelve, Reid carefully analyzes novels of varying lengths by a diverse selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century women writers. Her goal is to reveal the extreme...

Tracking the Latino Gender Gap: Gender Attitudes across Sex, Borders, and Generations

Many cultural stereotypes exist regarding the “modernity” of values possessed by Latino immigrants, particularly in reference to gender norms. Common perceptions about Latin machismo and marianismo (the idea that women should be pure and moral) do not paint a portrait of gender egalitarian dispositions. These assessments are upheld by neomodernization theorists who specifically identify gender attitudes as a critical element of modernity. In applying a revised modernization theory to the issue of comparative gender values, Inglehart and Norris (2003, 10) hypothesize that development “brings about changed cultural attitudes toward gender equality in virtually any society that experiences the various forms of modernization linked with economic development.” The idea that gender equality norms develop gradually, as a function of modernization, gives rise to different expectations about accepted gender roles in developing countries as opposed to those in advanced industrial democracies. Another feature of this modernization process is the emergence of gender gaps in political behavior and attitudes. Inglehart and Norris (2000) distinguish between traditional gender gaps found in postcommunist and developing societies (in which women are more conservative in their behavior and cultural attitudes relative to men) and modern gender gaps evident in postindustrial societies (in which women are more progressive than men).

Defending America in Mixed Company: Gender in the U.S. Armed Forces

Women have voluntarily served to defend America since the birth of our nation, often driven by necessity or the fight for equal opportunity, but always limited by law or policy grounded in accepted gender roles and norms. Today, women compose 1 4 percent of the total active-duty military, and more than 255,000 have deployed to combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. Despite their exemplary service and performance in combat, women are still restricted from serving in more than 220, 000 military positions solely because of their sex. Women also continue to be exempt from the Selective Service System, for which their male counterparts are required by law to register. Are these continued inconsistencies between the sexes in the area of national defense incongruent with democratic tenets ? Have we gone too far or not far enough in allowing or compelling women to defend the nation if required ?

After the fall from grace: negotiation of new identities among HIV‐positive women in Peru

Despite increasing rates of HIV infection among heterosexual women in Peru, married women remain virtually invisible as a group at risk of HIV or requiring treatment. This study analyzed the intersections of HIV with machismo and marianismo, the dominant discourses in Latin America that prescribe gender roles for men and women. Data sources include recent literature on machismo and marianismo and interviews conducted with 14 HIV‐positive women in Lima, Peru. Findings indicate how the stigma associated with HIV constructs a discourse that restricts the identities of HIV‐positive women to those of ‘fallen women’ whether or not they adhere to social codes that shape and inform their identities as faithful wives and devoted mothers. Lack of public discourse concerning HIV‐positive marianas silences women as wives and disenfranchises them as mothers, leaving them little room to negotiate identities that allow them to maintain their respected social positions. Efforts must be aimed at expanding the discourse of acceptable gender roles and behaviour for both men and women within the context of machismo and marianismo so that there can be better recognition of all persons at risk of, and living with, HIV infection.