Gender Role Models Research Articles

Does Physics Teaching Affect Gender-Based Science Anxiety?

We present the results of a study designed to measure the level of science anxiety in students enrolled in physics courses at Loyola University Chicago. We undertook this study with two objectives: (1) to determine the factors contributing to science anxiety; in particular, to ascertain whether the leading factors identified in an earlier study have remained constant over time, and (2) to investigate whether science anxiety was affected by a semester of introductory physics. This is the first study of its kind, analyzing science anxiety in pre- and posttests of a cohort composed entirely of students taking physics courses. We find that the leading factors contributing to science anxiety are nonscience anxiety, gender, and to a much lesser degree, course of study (major), in agreement with earlier results. In general, males start and end the course with somewhat less science anxiety (and nonscience anxiety) than females. Post-course responses indicated some improvement in nonscience anxiety and in science anxiety for both genders. Acute levels of science anxiety were somewhat decreased by exposure to a physics course. Different pedagogies and gender role models may correlate with anxiety reduction.

Gender at Work and at Home in Britain: Continuities and Changes

This paper discusses the views that British men and women hold about gender roles. Drawing on a survey with over 4,000 university students and interviews with professional men and women, it is suggested that, while the majority of both genders are moving toward an egalitarian model of gender roles, men's views are more likely than women's to be constrained by an essentialist mode] of gender. The data presented indicate that men were more likely than were women to endorse traditional gender roles, to regard women as better equipped for child care than men, to believe that women's advances necessarily disadvantage men, and to believe that men's work opportunities have worsened in comparison to women's. Drawing on both the interviews and the survey, it is also argued that beliefs about gender roles tend to be mediated by individualist discourses, which exempt exceptional individuals from normative gender roles.

‘Good lesbian, bad lesbian…’: regulating heterosexuality in fostering and adoption assessments

The paper examines the assessment of lesbians who apply to foster or adopt, using data generated from 30 interviews with local authority social workers. Using feminist and queer theories, the author suggests that lesbian applicants pose a challenge to the discourse of ‘compulsory gender and heterosexuality’ which structures fostering and adoption work. It is argued that this discourse relies upon a series of assumptions about the automatic fitness of heterosexual applicants, especially concerning the idea of gender and sexuality role models needed for children’s development. Further, this ‘heteronormative’ discourse relies upon the continuing need to make ‘other’ the categories ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’. The article considers how ‘the lesbian’ is constructed as a ‘threat’, as ‘militant’, or as ‘automatically safe’ in assessments, and makes the point that social work is productive of versions of the lesbian subject. The author argues that only certain versions are likely to be approved to foster or adopt, particularly that which is termed ‘the good lesbian’.

Testing a model of socially desirable and undesirable gender-role attributes

A recently outlined model of gender-role attributes (K. Korabik, 1999; D. R. McCreary & K. Korabik, 1994) incorporates two complimentary notions: (1) that possessing too little agency or communion (i.e., undersocialization) is undesirable and (2) that too much agency or communion unmitigated by the other (i.e., oversocialization) is undesirable. The present study sought to confirm the relationships proposed in this model between desirable agentic and communal characteristics and these undesirable gender-role constructs. A group of mostly Caucasian undergraduates completed measures of socially desirable and undesirable gender-role attributes. Structural equation modelling was used to confirm the proposed gender-role model. Results showed that the socially desirable gender-role trait components were related to the undesirable components in the manner predicted by the differentiated multidimensional gender-role model.

Masculinity and Femininity in Japanese Culture: A Pilot Study

This study examined masculinity and femininityin Japanese culture. Two hundred sixty-five collegestudents (male = 104; female = 161) took the Japaneseversion of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) with pertinent demographic questions. Subjects wereall Japanese and no other races were included. Theresults showed no significant difference betweenJapanese male college students and Japanese femalecollege students on both the Masculinity and Femininityscale of the BSRI. It was also found that both male andfemale Japanese college students scored higher on theFemininity scale than on the Masculinity scale of the BSRI. A confirmatory factor analysisalso supported that Bem's gender role model did not fitthe data collected in Japan. The limitations andimplications of the study are also discussed.

Gender Roles in a Traditionally Female Occupation: A Study of Emergency, Operating, Intensive Care, and Psychiatric Nurses

The gender roles of experienced Canadian nurses from four specialty teams were measured. Hypotheses concerning relationships with occupational fit and success were generated in accordance with three models of gender roles: congruence, masculinity, and androgyny models. Even though the nurses’ gender roles appeared rather androgynous, what was valued and rewarded was the masculine component. High femininity was associated with little experience, whereas high masculinity was associated with high pay and high contribution to group problem-solving. In addition, gender role relationships with work attitudes and organizational culture values were examined. The findings supported the proposal that gender roles represent complex self-identity schemata. Only femininity predicted level of organizational commitment and the value of commitment to the hospital, only masculinity predicted the hospital leadership value, and androgyny predicted values of innovation, change, patient focus and efficiency, and team relations. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The Influence of Parental Involvement on the Well-Being of Sons and Daughters

Research has found substantial evidence that high levels of parental involvement significantly affect adolescent well-being (Furstenberg, Morgan, & Allison, 1987; LeCroy, 1988; Richards, Gitelson, Peterson, & Hurtig, 1991). Some findings reveal differences in the effects of parental involvement by the gender of the adolescent. Previous research also indicates that maternal and paternal influences on adolescent well-being vary (Barber & Thomas, 1986; Gecas & Schwalbe, 1986). However, few of these studies have utilized longitudinal data to examine long-term influences of parental involvement in childhood on adolescent well-being. Additionally, while some evidence suggests that paternal presence is more important for adolescent well-being than parental involvement (Furstenberg et al., 1987), virtually none of the previous research addresses the relative effects of the loss of paternal presence and the nature of the parent/child relationship. In this study, we use longitudinal data from the National Survey of Children to examine the influence of mother and father involvement during childhood and adolescence on the well-being of sons and daughters. Three independent measures of well-being--self-esteem, life-satisfaction, and mental health--are analyzed. The impact of children's perceptions of parental factors important for the well-being of girls and boys is compared. Finally, the relative influence of the loss of father presence and parental involvement is assessed. PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT AND ADOLESCENT WELL-BEING The family is thought to be an important context for the development of long-term general well-being (Rollins & Thomas, 1979). The basis for mental well-being evolves in interaction with others, most notably in role playing, the majority of which occurs in childhood (Rosenberg, 1979). Thus, the involvement of parents with children has many implications for long-term well-being. However, while parental involvement with children forms a basis for well-being in adulthood, it is not the sole predictor. Among adult children, positive relationships with parents reduce psychological distress. Relationships with both mothers and fathers are salient determinants of sons' mental health, but the relationship with fathers is somewhat more important (Barnett, Marshall, & Pleck, 1992). For daughters, the effects of the relationship with both mother and father are about the same (Barnett, Kibria, Baruch, & Pleck, 1991). These results suggest that childhood, as well as ongoing, parent-child relations affect children's well-being. The basis for well-being is different for girls and boys because they seek substantively different kinds of approval from parents (Wood, Rhodes, & Whelan, 1989). Boys primarily gain their sense of worth from achievement in activities. Receiving respect from parents and spending time with parents are likely to have positive effects on boys' sense of self-worth. Given the importance of gender role models, it is particularly important for boys to receive this attention from fathers (Gecas & Schwalbe, 1986). Girls, on the other hand, tend to gain their sense of worth from a sense of social and moral acceptability. The perception of feeling loved and close to parents and the desire to be like parents are likely to be particularly important for girls' sense of self-worth, although this type of support has been shown to influence boys as well (Barber & Thomas, 1986; Openshaw, Thomas, & Rollins, 1983). The empirical evidence of the influence of parental involvement on children's well-being for the most part supports a positive relationship (Lamb, 1986, 1987; LeCroy, 1988; Richards et al., 1991). Often, however, previous research has examined only intact households (with both a mother and a father present). Thus, the impact of parental presence and the nature of parental involvement cannot be discerned. Furstenberg et al. (1987) examined the impact of paternal involvement on children when a father is lost, but they included only children who had experienced marital disruption. …

Of Dolls and Girls in Nineteenth-Century France

Of Dolls and Girls in Nineteenth-Century France Valérie C. Lastinger (bio) Most French children become acquainted with the nineteenth-century poet Victor Hugo through excerpts from his novel Les Misérables, a book filled with lively and memorable children. The three main female children characters—Cosette, Ponine, and Zelma—are introduced after the following passage: A doll is one of the most imperious needs, and at the same time one of the most charming instincts, of female childhood. . . . To care for, to clothe, to adorn, to dress, to undress, to dress over, to teach, to scold a little, to rock, to cuddle, to put to sleep, to imagine that something is somebody—all the future of woman is there. . . . The first baby takes the place of the last doll. A little girl without a doll is almost as unfortunate and quite as impossible as a woman without children. [343] Reading this passage, Laura Kreyder comments that "these famous pages . . . continue to represent the model of the play-relation of the 'child-woman' in yesterday and today's textbooks" (90).1 Certainly, Victor Hugo remains a dominant patriarchal authority figure in France; within the narrow limits of these few lines, feminists can recognize a deterministic summary of maternity as the only possible female destiny. Hugo's responsibility is great; his impress on French literature and politics and his influence in the domain of French children's literature are undeniable. French children today commonly read abridged versions of Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831). Excerpts from Les Misérabks, as Kreyder notes, are usually part of grade school curricula, and the favorite passages—those that deal with Cosette as a child—are the passages I consider here. It is tempting for feminists to portray Hugo as perpetuating a conditioning of female childhood into the maternal role. At the center of this conditioning rests the doll, this reified child—usually, this reified female child. But Hugo deserves a fair hearing; an analysis [End Page 20] of gender role models should not rest on a few lines. These few lines, moreover, should be read with great care, for they are rich and controversial. Indeed, Hugo's text contains a number of "windows" through which readers may glimpse a world not quite so rigid as the one first readily perceived. Typically Hugolian, typically romantic, the rhetoric of the passage is based on a series of binary oppositions or equivalences: imperious/charming; something/ somebody; doll-less girl/childless woman; first baby/last doll. These rhetorical pairs, so familiar to Hugo's landscape and so forcibly penetrating the reader's mind, prove here, however, to be just as many sophisms for the contemporary reader.2 Where, we may ask, is the rational impossibility in the sentence "as impossible as a woman without children"? The word impossible works on at least two levels, implying both biological impossibility and an incompatibility of characters (that is, a woman without children is impossible to live with). Of course, infertility is hardly rare and barren women are not necessarily high-strung and inflexible. Thus taken apart, Hugo's deceptive aphorism implies another: "a little girl without a doll is as possible as a woman without children." Take another of Hugo's assertions: "to imagine that something is somebody, all the future of woman is there." The cleanness of such a phrasing at first seduces, but again one is tempted to reverse the sentence to make sense of it. Under patriarchy, a woman's future is not to imagine that something is somebody but rather to understand that she, somebody, is something. The temptation to reverse the axiom is all the stronger since historians have shown that by the late seventeenth century, contrary to earlier practice, babies were certainly considered as somebody rather than something(Aries 53-73).3 With such examples of the slyness of apparently clear-cut sentences, one suspects that when it comes to the portrayal of gender, Hugo may also distort stereotypes. In this context, a stereotype is defined as an idea that on a superficial level can pass as being expected, predictable, unimaginative. In the opening passage, for...

The wages of sin: censorship and the fallen woman film, 1928-1942

story of the fallen woman was a staple of film melodrama in the late 20s and early 30s. In traditional versions of the plot a woman commits a sexual transgression, usually adultery. Expelled from the family, she becomes an outcast, often a prostitute, suffering various humiliations that usually culminate in her death. In more modern variants, the heroine is a stereotypical kept woman, gold-digger, or wise-cracking shopgirl who uses men to become rich. Recognized and defined rather loosely as a type, the fallen woman film, often called the sex picture, became a lightning rod for regulation by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), the industry trade association responsible for censorship. The Wages of Sin uses the example of the fallen woman film to examine the institutional framework of industry self-regulation and to consider how the representation of sexuality was circumscribed within this context. Mining the extensive MPPDA files, Lea Jacobs reconstructs this process of self-regulation, focusing in particular upon six films that posed distinct problems for the MPPDA because they had encountered difficulties with state censors, or had provoked protest from reform groups. In her historical study, Jacobs combines a knowledge of recent film theory with readings of The Easiest Way, Babyface, Blonde Venus, Anna Karenina, Kitty Foyle and Stella Dallas to show the ideological processes of self-regulation at work and the social constraints under which the film industry operated. Industry self-regulation did not proceed by cutting things out of completed films, but rather by a process of negotiation between producers and industry censors about material that was thought to be potentially offensive in story treatments and scripts. They engaged in debates about how to promote ideal models of gender roles, marriage and family life within the constraints of the fallen woman genre. Jacobs demonstrates that the codification of censorship and the codification of the genre itself were inextricable.

Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique: Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory

Two Newbery Medal Winners and the Feminine Mystique:Hitty, Her First Hundred Years and Miss Hickory* Lois R. Kuznets (bio) Through the decades the authors of Newbery and Caldecott books have consciously, and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, revealed the concerns, manners and attitudes of the society in which they lived. This is true not only of realistic fiction, but of other genres as well, especially historical fiction and fantasy. As a consequence the books are interesting as documents of social history as well as literature for children. (Peterson and Solt 10) In the mid-twentieth century, two doll stories won Newbery Medals seventeen years apart: Rachel Field's Hitty, Her First Hundred Years in 1930 and Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's Miss Hickory in 1947. As well as doll fantasy, the first text can be considered historical fiction in the form of a personal memoir of American experience through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the second, while also a doll fantasy, seems ahistorical—set in a universal, seasonal time in rural New England; it also partakes, to some extent, of the Robinsonade—the tale of survival in the wilderness. What follows in this essay should be dubbed feminist analysis: I examine the nature and tradition of doll stories in general while comparing these two doll narratives in terms of both form and cultural history, actively responding to what I read in each text. At the ChLA Conference in San Diego in 1990, Valerie Cretaux presented a paper entitled "Beyond Gender Role Model Stereotyping: The Fate of Girls and Dolls in Nineteenth-Century France." She demonstrated that what Victor Hugo's narrator in Les Misérables says about little girls' [End Page 1] treating dolls as models of future babies is not confirmed by what the text shows about little girls and dolls.1 Cosette, the child, first cuddles a sword, and then treats her gift doll as a mother figure and a powerful female role model in a struggle not to conform to the passive feminine and benignly maternal stereo-archetype that both Jean Valjean, the doll giver, and the narrator seem to posit. In the same paper, Cretaux demonstrates that another nineteenth-century writer, Sophie de Ségur (1799-1874), writing specifically for children in her Les Malheurs de Sophie, shows the girl child to have aggressively hostile feelings toward her doll, which here takes the baby role, only to be mutilated and destroyed beyond repair; dolly's demise is celebrated in a grand and joyous funeral. The mutilated doll lying in state and then buried gaily contrasts well, as Cretaux points out, with that archetypal image of female life-in-death and sexual resurrection: intact Snow White waiting in her glass coffin for the prince's kiss. In the mid-nineteenth century, Juliana Ewing's mother, Mrs. Alfred Gatty, published a doll memoir, Aunt Sally's Life, which depicts multiple unsentimental doll burials along with multiple mutilations, all in the life of one doll.2 And familiar doll scenes from nineteenth-century British books not specifically for children, Jane Eyre and The Mill on the Floss, like their French counterparts, depict the idiosyncratic ways in which girls and dolls interact. Abused Jane Eyre treats her doll as a consolatory object and pampers it as no one pampers Jane, but rebellious Maggie Tulliver alternately babies and abuses her doll. Even more clearly, Frances Hodgson Burnett, in her autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All, shows what a rebellious and creative little female can do with a doll and a plot line. Her doll played the heroine roles in a number of dramas taken from received texts and Burnett's own imagination while Burnett herself played all the hero and villain roles. The doll certainly learned to conform to the image of the culturally approved female in literature; whether her young mistress did the same is questionable. So, as Naomi Lewis notes also in introducing The Silent Playmate, "the doll and child relationship is not as simple and crude as the nondoll-liker desires to think. Make no mistake—unless this happens to be the play of the moment . . . the child is not the parent of the doll...

Gender and Homicide: A Comparison of Men and Women Who Kill

This study compares the patterns of homicides committed by women and men. Classic comparison studies of homicides by men and women suggest that each group kills in ways that are reflective of socially approved gender role behavior. More recently, however, research on women who kill suggests that they frequently do so in response to threats of violence by men. In contrast to the gender role and self-protection models of women's homicides, the liberation hypothesis suggests that patterns of women's violence will increasingly resemble patterns of violence by men. Based on our analysis of court records of 158 cases of homicides by men and women over a six-year period, we find little support for the liberation hypothesis and considerable support for the gender role and self-protection models. Compared to men, women more frequently kill intimates and kill in situations in which their victim initiated the physical aggression.