Note: This article concentrates on male/female gender roles and not on the broad spectrum of gender identity.
Gender expectations start before babies are born. It is not unusual for fathers to want a son to play sports together and mothers to want a daughter to doll up. While pregnant, I told a lady in the tram that I am expecting a baby girl. She told me to count myself lucky as daughters are more inclined to keep in touch with family after leaving the nest. Not even born, and my daughter was already supposed to fit a specific gentle, caring, and above all, female image.
In her extraordinary Delusions of Gender book, Cordelia Fine talks about an experiment where mothers were asked to describe the movement of their foetuses in the last pregnancy trimester. Women that didn’t know the sex of their babies didn’t use any specific pattern of words.
However, expecting mothers that knew the sex of their babies described babies’ movements quite differently. The male activity was more likely to be described as “vigorous” or “strong”, and female activity was described as “not violent” or “not terribly active”.
Fine also shows in her book how gender-neutral parenting is almost impossible. She presents the story of a family of psychologists, Sandra and Daryl Bem, who, in the 1970s, wanted to raise their children in a gender-neutral fashion. Their efforts were titanic.
First, they tried to reduce all the gender associations in a child’s environment: toys, colours, behaviours, occupations, hobbies, clothing, hairstyle, emotions, etc. Their children played with dolls and trucks or wore pink and blue alike (remember, this happened in the 1970s).
The parents doctored all their children’s books removing beards, lengthening hair, or adding breasts to create female illustrations (as you can imagine, in those times, the children’s books illustrations were almost exclusively male). They deleted or modified sections of text that contained female or male stereotypes and taught their children to assign gender to people based on their anatomy and reproductive functions. In an endearing story, Bem’ son wore a barrette to kindergarten one day. When one of his classmates said he was a girl, the boy replied he had a penis, not a vagina. The colleague retorted, “everyone has a penis, but only girls wear barrettes.”
The moral of this story is that even if parents would try to avoid labelling their daughters and sons differently, the immense peer pressure would quickly remind us of gender stereotypes.
In a study, sociologist Emily W. Kane discovered that mothers and fathers celebrated with no reservations what they perceived as gender nonconformity regarding their daughters. They enjoyed dressing their girls in sports-themed clothing, playing with toy cars, trucks, trains, or building sets.
Some parents actively encouraged their girls to aspire to traditionally male occupations and described with positive remarks that their daughters are tomboyish,” “rough and tumble,” and “competitive athletically.”
Regarding sons, the waters of gender expression were muddier. Most of the interviewed parents celebrated and encouraged their sons’ to step out of gender norms. Their boys played with traditionally girl toys, such as dolls and dollhouses, kitchen and tea sets. A white, middle-class, heterosexual father emphasized the positive response to boys engaging in pretend domestic activities with an excellent insight: “How then are they going to learn to take care of their children if they don’t (play with dolls)?”
But this positive response proved to be limited to only a few so-called feminine qualities such as domestic skills, nurturing, and empathy. Parents became concerned if sons wished to have their fingernails or toenails polished, or boys wanted to wear pink or clothes such as skirts, dresses, tights, wanted to take dance classes or the horror!, they wanted to play with Barbie dolls.
“This stupid world cares about what we look like, unfortunately. . . You know, it shouldn’t, probably shouldn’t matter. It’s a piece of cloth, but that’s the way the world is, and I wouldn’t want him to feel out of place” (a mother from Kane’s study). In another article, I touched on gender-biased colours and the history behind the pink versus blue debate.
But why do parents tend to restrict their sons’ likes and preferences? Because of the way we tend to treat men that display feminine characteristics. As a mother explained it, “I just want him to be a boy and play with the boys, not to like girl things. If he did that, the boys would think he’s weird, and then he’d be lonely”.
Somehow, girls don’t mind that much if a girl likes boys’ things.
We don’t have to look further than the English language to check the different words we have. A girl that prefers more masculine toys, hobbies, clothes etc., is a tomboy, whereas a boy that likes more feminine items is a sissy or a wimp. Sissy or wimps are insults, while tomboy is not as negatively charged.
The same thing happens in Romanian, my native language: the term for a girl that prefers male traits is “baietoasa” (endearing meaning), and for a boy that likes female attributes is “fatalau” (rude meaning).
Is there any surprise that parents would be extremely cautious about how their peers would treat their sons?
One remarkable thing from Kane’s study is how parents view masculinity as something that needs to be shaped, constructed, and actively pursued. Parents would refuse to buy sons pink Power Puff Girls t-shirts, refuse to let sons take ballet classes. They would say nail polish is for little girls, not for little boys (Babylonian warriors used to paint their nails with kohl before battles. In different cultures, nail polish was a sign to differentiate between social classes and ranks). Parents would compromise to buy NASCAR Barbies (NASCAR is an American stock car racing so that Barbie would have at least a masculine attribute).
Reading this study, which I highly recommend, I couldn’t stop thinking of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (the concept that gender is a social construct, and not a biological trait). Similarly, some parents act like “one is not born, but rather is raised a boy”.
It seems that gender nonconformity is more acceptable in relations with girls than boys. Not so fast. We live in a world where different cultures still view women as sub-human, commodities ready to use, abuse, sell or kill.
The egalitarian attitude between men and women is very new. After all, no earlier than 1991 (yes, 1991), the Appenzell Innerrhoden (Swiss canton) was forced to accept women’s suffrage by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland.
Because of the egalitarian novelty, we still value boys and girls differently and for different qualities. How society, prejudice, biases, sexism influence our perception of girls is easily the subject of a book, so I will keep it short.
For example, should a girl show some determinism in her actions or being too confident and assertive, she is branded bossy or pushy. When a boy does the same, he is called a leader or a go-getter. After all, when was the last time you labelled a male as pushy or bossy? Chances are almost never.
Why is that? Perhaps because pushy or bossy are pejorative terms aimed at girls, samples from a set of labels of how we teach girls to sit down, not make a fuss, learn their place. I assume we can all agree on the power “pushy” or “bossy” hold over little girls’ wings when they hear these labels, especially from parents or teachers.
This shaming-labelling continues in adulthood.
When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as “competent but cold”: the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle-axe, the dragon lady…
Put bluntly, we don’t like the look of self-promotion and power on women.
Cordelia Fine – Delusions of Gender
Look no further than Australian prime minister Julia Gillard’s speech. She tells how she, an atheist, unmarried, childless prime minister, was viciously attacked and verbally abused by the Opposition party.
Then, take the example of seemingly innocent jokes. As we have a daughter, we have already received warnings to get a rifle when our daughter becomes a teenager. Most probably, we are not the only parents of daughters to get such comments. But look deeply under the meaning of these words, and what can we find? The mindset that women are a trophy or a prize, worthy of cherishing and protection from men.
I lost track of how many times I heard girls being addressed as “little princesses”. And yet, I don’t think I have ever heard somebody called a boy “little prince” (except, of course, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry).
Go to a toy store and tell the salesperson you are looking for a present for a child. Most often than not, the first question would be, “is it for a boy or a girl?” Should it matter? Although we have more gender-neutral toys, the unspoken gift rule is still “dolls for girls, cars for boys”.
As I discussed in The four styles of parenting, sometimes parents behave and have different expectations from daughters compared to their sons. There are instances in which parents are leaning toward an authoritative style with daughters (“Oh no! What happened? Why are you crying?”) and an authoritarian manner with sons (“Big boys don’t cry” or sexist remarks as “crying is for little girls”).
At some point, my daughter was hit and pushed by a boy in the creche. While talking about the incidents to the involved parents and educators, I heard excuses such as “boys will be boys” or “maybe he likes her”. The hidden, dangerous implications were that we expect little boys to express themselves through pushing, hitting, and pulling hair or that it is ok to teach children such behaviours are acceptable and should be interpreted as tokens of affection. But when a girl was the one who did the hitting in the classroom, I never heard “girls will be girls”, and parents and educators labelled this behaviour for what it was: bullying. Was it perhaps because violent behaviours from little girls don’t fit the narrative of girls being more emotional-literate and using words to express their feelings?
Neurosexism is a term coined by Cordelia Fine, and it is the assumption that there are fixed differences between female and male brains, thus reinforcing biases and gender stereotypes.
One defining characteristic of my Romanian upbringing is that I do not recall any memories of neurosexism. That could either mean:
a) I never experienced neurosexism while growing up (utopic) or
b) the neurosexist remarks ended up being insignificant because they were outnumbered by gender-neutral remarks, and so, my brain decided to prune the memories of those moments (most probably).
As my daughter will soon start school, I wonder if she will experiment a neurosexist-free childhood like me. And if she does hear neurosexist remarks, it is up to us, her parents, to teach her the skills to kick out the thoughts that will try to make her small.
Even though we might be careful about our remarks, let’s not forget the microscopic, unspoken language of behaviour: the way we speak, we look at things, we smile, we pause.
Children pick up all these nonverbal cues much more accurately than us because actions speak louder than words. Does our body express enthusiasm or unease? Are we glad that our sons want a Barbie for his birthday or do we look terrified? Do we show disdain that our sons are crying? Do we let our sons try everything in the park and don’t let our daughters go on the big slide?
Children are sponges and absorb our reactions and responses through a powerful skill called deferred imitation. Through deferred imitation (repeat and practice the actions of others, either immediately or later), babies and toddlers learn to make sense of their environment. Deferred imitation helps explain why children are predisposed to copying their parents. After all, how many times did I not open my mouth only for my mother’s words to come out? Thus, parents’ unconscious biases are transferred to children.
Our social fabric is too gendered to raise a child in a gender-neutral fashion. Family expectations, peers’ influences, cultural conditioning, social cues, merchandise, nonverbal communication, preconceived biases, micro and macro effects that shape perceived gender roles are ubiquitous. So, with all these subtle nuances of constricted, gendered environments, can we genuinely say that assigned gender activities are only inevitable, natural differences between males and females? Or perhaps gender roles are social labels?
Note: A close friend sent me this Guardian link about Lego to remove gender bias from its toys after the findings of a survey. Unsurprisingly, “seventy-one per cent of boys surveyed feared they would be made fun of if they played with what they described as “girls’ toys” – a fear shared by their parents. “Parents are more worried that their sons will be teased than their daughters for playing with toys associated with the other gender,” said Madeline Di Nonno, the chief executive of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, who conducted the research.” As a result, Lego no longer categorizes toys as “for girls” or “for boys”, but per themes.