Agents of Socialization and Gender

Reminder for HW:  C J Pascoe's Dude You're a Fag, background info is here.

From yesterday:  
1.  Recall the concept of social construction of reality.  What is it? How does it apply to gender?

2.  Any questions from yesterday?  Are you able to answeer the questions on page 2 of your packet?



Individual Reflection:  Look at the handout called "Socialization of Gender Roles."

Part 1:  Take a moment to think about where you have heard the various phrases on your handout.
Student Discussion:  Where have you heard these?

Part 2: Think about what traits those phrases emphasize for men or women respectively.
Student Discussion:  What are the messages that these agents have taught you?


What are the boxes of the binary?

These are some of the traditional traits that dominant (white, heterosexual, male) US culture has pushed for each gender.  Note that these are traditional in the sense that society has generally promoted them, even if they do not apply to you.  To be clear, I am not saying that men and women should be these ways, I am saying that society has traditionally socialized men and women to be these ways.  Furthermore, on average, categorically, men and women are in deed different but not at the exclusivity of each other.  Males and females both have testosterone and estrogen.  They can both be all of these traits.

Examples of data/evidence for the binary.

• Gendered Products; See this post about products that are pointlessly gendered thus reifying the idea of traditional gender traits.  
• Gendered Halloween costumes.

For small groups:  Data scavenger hunt!  In small groups, see how many words you can find that are completely gendered.  Make a list.

One example of how socialization shapes Americans is how they perceive their professors.  Sociology professor Ben Schmidt has gathered the metadata from ratemyprofessor.com here at his site, Gendered Language in Teacher Reviews. The interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com. You can enter any word (or two-word phrase) into the box below to see how it is split across gender and discipline: the x-axis gives how many times your term is used per million words of text (normalized against gender and field). You can also limit to just negative or positive reviews (based on the numeric ratings on the site). For some more background, see here. Not all words have gender splits, but a surprising number do. Even things like pronouns are used quite differently by gender.