Here is your free essay on Gender stereotypes

Gender stereotypes are unsophisticated generalizations about the gender characteristics, dissimilarities, and roles of individuals and/ or groups. Stereotypes can be positive or negative, but they rarely communicate accurate information about others.

When people automatically apply gender assumptions to others regardless of evidence to the contrary, they are perpetuating gender stereotyping. Many people recognize the dangers of gender stereotyping, yet continue to make these types of generalizations.

Gender stereotypes present a conventionally simplified and standardized conception or image concerning the typical social roles of male and female, both domestically and socially. To simplify this definition, gender stereotypes are beliefs held about characteristics, traits, and activity-domains that are “deemed” appropriate for men and women.

For example, traditionally, typical characteristics for women are piety, submissiveness, and domesticity, while authority, and social behavior, are traits commonly held by men. However, as the product of social activity, gender stereotypes are neither perpetual nor static. They are influenced by the social ideology and economic mode held at a certain period of time accordingly, and is changing, even at

times reversing, with every significant social transformation. In the following section, this change and “crossing” of gender stereotypes will be discussed.

Male and female, which consist of human society, are two natural and contradictory forces in the cosmos. The ancient Chinese labeled them as Yin and Yang. Yin represents the female, the negative, the darkness and softness. The Yang, on the other hand, represents the male, the positive, brightness, and hardness.

Yin and Yang, according to the Chinese, are, in a constant state of flux, interacting with each other and thusly balance the universe. It is because of the strong belief of this universal law, which decides the nature of female and male. This in turn results in the primitive gender stereotypes found throughout history.

Men and women take their responsibilities respectively according to the division of the natural characteristics of gender. The gender stereotypes are reflected in various fields, such as marriage, family, politics, and economy.

In Asian countries, traditionally, the females’ role was to be in charge of domestic matters, such as serving her husband, looking after her children, and performing household chores like cooking and cleaning.

This type of female was appreciated as “virtuous”. An old Chinese proverb on women states: “Talentless is virtuous”. “Tolerance” and “obedience” were women attitudes towards their lives. According to this gender “philosophy”, in ancient China, women had no right to go to school.

Schooling was available only for a rich family’s male figure. Family was the single content of a women life, which in turn was regarded as yet another virtue. It is because of this social moral concept that women, after they were born, together with their family began to prepare for their marriage passively.

Marriage was the only measurement for a woman’s life value. Females had no self-esteem or a concept of their-own selfhood. Instead, society viewed them as an appurtenant of their husband.

Tracing the reasons for these types of gender stereotypes, one can perceive the influence of a “men-dominated” social system where the male dominates the activities related to economics.

The economy mode, to a certain extent, decides the social position of men and women: men are the center of family and society, which women are a part of property of men. Followed by this gender stereotype, responding social characteristics emerge, such as the family mode of one husband having several wives; men are the definite economy-controller of family and society, etc.