Impacts of Gender Roles on Family Life in the United States and Other Cultures

Gender Roles on Family Life in the United States

Gender roles consist of shared expectations that apply to individuals on the basis of their socially identified sex. The sharing of gender roles refers to the tendency of expectations associated with men and women to be consensual in society. At an implicit or explicit level, most people endorse expected behaviors as appropriate for men or for women. Therefore, as Eagly's social role theory argues, membership in the female or male social category subjects people to social expectations that affect social interaction in group situations and influence the intergroup behavior that transpires between women and men. This entry defines gender roles and discusses the consequences of deviation from them, their effect on selfconcepts, theories about their origin, and their impact on individuals and society (Bataller, pp. 119-138).

The definition of gender roles derives from the concept of social role, which refers to the shared expectations that apply to people who occupy a certain social position or are members of a particular social category. At an individual level, roles are schemas, or abstract knowledge structures, pertaining to a group of people (Dunn, pp. 37-50).

Gender roles apply to people in the extremely general social categories of male and female. These roles, like roles based on qualities such as age, social class, and race/ethnicity, have great scope because they apply to all aspects of people's daily lives. In contrast, more specific roles based on factors such as family relationships (e.g., father, daughter) and occupation (e.g., nurse, police officer) are mainly relevant to behavior in a particular social context—at work, for example, in the case of occupational roles (Gordon, pp. 51-55). This general applicability of gender roles means that they influence behavior, even though specific roles simultaneously constrain behavior. For example, because gender roles are present in the workplace, people have somewhat different expectations for female and male occupants of the same workplace role.

Family and the Division of Labor

Historical and cross-cultural evidence suggest that there are no universals in the tasks that fathers and mothers perform apart from the earliest infant care and breastfeeding. Economic and structural changes have had enormous impact on both men's and women's access to social resources and subsequent gender relations within families. For instance, in the United States, industrialization and the 19th-century transition away from an agricultural, family-based economy changed the ways that men and women related to social institutions and to one another. Within the family-based economy, women, men, and children had worked together; both parents took responsibility for childrearing (Koch, pp. 20).

According to the current construction of gender roles in U.S. families, women are expected to provide the bulk of caregiving at all stages of the life course. For instance, the motherhood role demands that women be the primary caregiver to children, even women who work full time, and the less-involved style of parenting for fathers has persisted well past the demise of the normative marital combination ...