Gender as a Social Construct Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The effective strategy is discussion about gender bias.

Talking openly with children about stereotypes, for example asking why only girls should cook or only boys should play cricket, helps them notice and question fixed ideas about what each gender can do. It builds awareness, which is the first step in reducing stereotyping.

The other three options strengthen stereotypes rather than reduce them. Stressing gender-specific roles, and separating boys and girls in play groups or seating, all teach children that the genders belong in different places.

Answer: D

Such beliefs are gender stereotypes.

A stereotype is a widely held, oversimplified belief about the characteristics of a group. Gender stereotypes are the typified ideas about what is appropriate for males and females, such as 'boys are strong and rational, girls are gentle and caring', applied to every member of the group regardless of the individual.

Gender roles are the behaviours and tasks a society expects of each sex, which stereotypes help to sustain. Gender identity is a person's own sense of being male, female or another gender. Gender discrimination is unequal treatment on the basis of gender, an action rather than a belief.

Answer: B

The move is important because it aims to eliminate gender stereotyping.

Stories showing a father doing household work and a mother on an adventure break the usual pattern in which only women do housework and only men take risks. Children learn gender expectations partly from the material they read, so curriculum that shows people in non-traditional roles helps them see that abilities and tasks are not fixed by sex.

Such stories weaken gender bias and discrimination rather than strengthening or increasing them. Gender constancy, Kohlberg's term for a young child's understanding that one's sex stays the same over time, is a normal developmental milestone and not what the curriculum change is about.

Answer: B

They are gender roles.

Gender roles are the patterns of behaviour a culture expects and approves for males and females, learnt through socialisation in the family, school and media, such as which jobs, chores or games are thought suitable for boys or for girls.

A gender stereotype is an oversimplified belief about what males or females are like, for example 'girls are bad at mathematics'. Gender bias is unequal treatment based on gender. Gender constancy, in Kohlberg's account of gender development, is a child's understanding that his or her gender stays the same despite changes in clothes or activities. None of these is the pattern of behaviour itself.

Answer: D

Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).

Research on classrooms finds that teachers often expect different things from boys and girls, for example more noise and more mathematics from boys and more neatness and obedience from girls. So the Assertion is true.

The Reason says where those expectations come from. Beliefs about biological sex differences feed gender stereotypes, and stereotypes sort children into just two fixed labels, 'boys' and 'girls', each with its own expected behaviour. A teacher holding those stereotypes will expect different things from the two groups, so (R) explains (A). This rules out the options that call either statement false or deny the link.

Answer: A

The process is gender typing.

Gender typing is how children come to learn the roles, behaviour, interests and attitudes that their society treats as suitable for boys or for girls, through family, peers, media and school.

Gender equality is the principle that all genders should have equal rights and opportunities; it is a social goal, not the learning process. Gender relatedness and gender homogeneity are not standard terms for how children become aware of gender roles.

Answer: D

A child's first experiences and expectations about being a girl or a boy come from the family.

The family is the primary agent of socialisation. Long before school, parents and siblings name the child as a boy or girl, choose clothes and toys, assign chores and react differently to behaviour, and the child absorbs these messages first.

Media, relatives and the neighbourhood also shape ideas of gender, but they act later or less directly as secondary influences, so none of them is the first source.

Answer: B

The effective way is exposing children to diverse gender roles and encouraging them to pursue their interests.

Gender stereotypes are learnt from what children see around them. Showing them women and men in a wide range of roles, and letting each child follow their own interests, weakens the idea that some activities belong to one gender.

Gender-specific materials and pressure to conform to traditional roles reinforce stereotypes. Assuming that children will drift to gender-neutral interests on their own leaves the stereotypes already present in society unchallenged, so it is not an active strategy at all.

Answer: A

The stereotype is that housework is women's natural work.

A stereotype fixes people into one image. The common one about housework is that it comes naturally to women, so they are expected to do it and it is not counted as real work. That is why such work is unpaid and often invisible.

The other options are not the stereotype. That housework is time-consuming for women is a fact shown by time-use studies, and that it is valuable work women do is the view that challenges the stereotype. 'Difficult for women' is not the usual way housework is stereotyped; the stereotype is that women are naturally suited to it.

Answer: C

The correct statement is that gender identity is influenced by cultural conceptions.

Contemporary views separate biological sex from gender. Gender, the roles, behaviours and identities a society associates with being male, female or otherwise, is learned through family, school, media and culture, so what counts as masculine or feminine varies across societies and periods.

The other statements are the older views the question rules out. Gender is not purely determined by anatomy at birth, it is not seen as a strict binary, and socialization is one of the main influences on gender identity, not something without influence on it.