At age three months, infant boys shown something new become more active; girls become more quiet. Girls have a longer attention span. Boys are more restless in all cultures; this makes it harder for boys to sit still in classrooms.
Boys tend to play in large, hierarchical groups. There are leaders who give orders and make rules. Boys have winners and losers. Girls play in smaller groups or in pairs. The center of a girl’s social life is her best friend; intimacy is key. In girls’ games, everyone gets a turn. Girls share and don’t want to be seen as bossy; they want to be liked.
So what starts as biologically induced is confirmed and strengthened by societal expectations. When girls become women, talk is still the glue that holds relationships together. For boys and men, relationships are held together by activities and talking about them. Boys and men want to be leaders; they like hierarchy (who is up, who is down). Girls and women prefer to share leadership; they see the world more horizontally (who is close, who is distant).
According to David Brooks (New York Times, October 12, 2018), by adolescence, boys earn their manhood by differentiating themselves from girls; they turn stoical, unemotional and tough. Our culture teaches girls not to speak up and boys not to feel. Girls say I don’t know, while boys say I don’t care. Boys are pushed away from honest sharing and deep connections.
This is what always has been. Has anything changed as we approach being a quarter of the way through the 21st century? According to Amanda Lucier (New York Times, September 14, 2018) middle school girls said what they value most in themselves is intelligence and confidence. Yet they also said that society still places the most value on looks. Girls still feel undervalued and objectified by boys. On the other hand, girls now can see themselves as astronauts and are seizing opportunities closed to previous generations in science, math, sports, and leadership. Most girls are aware of the me too movement and thus feel they can tell someone if they are harassed or assaulted. There is a new push for equality being taught in schools as well as consequences for men who discriminate and harass women in the workplace.
What has not changed is that boys are expected to be physically strong and not show emotions (real men don’t cry) while girls talk freely about their feelings. What starts on playgrounds early in life continues on the adult playgrounds of work and home. Claire Cain Miller (New York Times, September 14, 2018) writes that men feel pressure to be financially successful and tough, whereas women feel the pressure to be involved as family caretakers and nurturers.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that stereotypical beliefs about gender differences remain strong; sexism is still widespread. Our society still places a higher premium on masculinity than femininity; this is reflected in how we raise children. While there is a push for parents to teach gender equality, most respondents thought that teaching girls to be more like boys was acceptable, but not the other way around.
In the past, the issue of where to live used to be resolved by the man’s larger salary. Today the monetary compensation may be equal or hers even higher. Modern couples are dealing with a new set of problems, such as where to live if each partner’s job is in a different city, whether to have separate or joint bank accounts, managing different schedules of work and leisure, and how to divide household chores, childcare, and more and more frequently, as our population ages, elder care.
Today’s young people have no role models for how gender roles should be expressed. Their fathers helped with cleaning and washing the dishes, but they needed to be asked and had to be reminded; the ultimate responsibility still belonged to their mothers. Grandfathers were never asked to help out with household chores. Young couples require better communication skills, a willingness to talk about values, beliefs, and preconceived notions of gender roles, which are more up for grabs than ever before with new options of gender classifications. Each person, each family needs to resolve these evolving identities and hence relationships. It is an exciting time for the young people of today who get to redefine what it is to be a woman or a man and the prerogatives of each as well as the responsibilities.