Gender Roles: Male And Female Roles In Society

The past decade has seen tremendous growth in gender politics in the United States, with social movements such as the fourth wave feminism, pride parades, and men’s rights movement, amongst many others, currently dominating the American culture. However, the United States is not alone. While it has been applauded for surfacing deep-rooted issues of discrimination & hate in society, it has also been cited as a top contributor to the decay in social cohesion, leading to an increasingly divisive society. Modern gender politics has sparked a significant number of polarizing debates & heated conversations on gender stereotypes, their origins, and their influence on society.

In this text, I will be tackling the controversial question of whether gender roles are determined by biology or constructed by society and offer explanations & evidence as to why gender roles are biologically determined for the most part.

One of the most apparent proponents for gender roles as a biological product is the stark difference in physicality between the average male and female.

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While the first semblance of modern society emerged a few hundred years ago, the body of a modern human has yet to evolve beyond the hunter-gatherer archetype, which has been built and honed through millions of years of evolution. Characteristics exhibited by this hunter-gatherer archetype often dictate the sexual division of labor that males and females serve in prehistoric society. Due to the rapid modernization of our society, many of such characteristics have been retained in our genetic codes as a result of the insufficient period for evolutionary changes to occur.

Physicality is one of them. Modern men have, on average, 12 kilograms more skeletal muscle mass than modern women. This difference in physical fitness standards explains the necessity for gender segregation in most sports as males and females do not compete on a level playing field from a genetic perspective. Similarly, in other areas of opportunities & fields of specialization where physicality is an important determinant attribute, females have a higher tendency to lose out to their male counterparts. It is this biological difference between males and females that heavily influences the type of labor or activity that each gender can typically engage and compete in, which consequently determines the general purposes & functions that each gender serves in modern society.

Apart from physicality, gender roles are determined from another biological front as well – the difference in psychology between the genders. From an evolutionary perspective, this difference in psychology could be attributed to the sexual division of labor, roles that each gender has separately served for countless millennia throughout human evolution. Each gender has evolved distinctly to possess refined personality traits that maximize utilization and minimize redundancy in its respective areas of specialization within society. As the adage goes “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”, psychological studies are supporting this theory too. Naturally, as people tend to pursue a career based on their strengths and its compatibility with their temperaments, the disparity in representation of genders across male-dominated or female-dominated occupations supports the proposition that men and women are different in their temperaments. From a macro perspective, this biological difference between the genders plays a major role in the work industries that each gender is willing & able to participate in and thereby, forms its role in society. They assert that societal expectations & cultural stereotypes about genders have led to the divergence in temperaments between the genders to conform.

Finally, In countries that have been rated as more gender-neutral, the differences between personalities of men and women are discovered to be even larger, compared to countries that scored lower on the gender equality index. Other gender studies have also shown that men and women have different dispositional interests, with men gravitating towards things and women leaning towards people. This is further supported by the gender-equality paradox which suggests countries with more progressive and egalitarian views have a higher gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.