Originally Posted by
Oracle
It's less what they say you can't be, and more what they say you can be. Because of these aforementioned gender roles that society still perpetuates, the jobs children are pushed towards are different. There's been an improvement in recent years, but you'll still see that there's a gender divide even as children between jobs, and a lot of it seems to be based around gender stereotypes. Boys are more likely to want to grow up to be athletes, firefighters, astronauts etc. etc. while girls are more likely to want to grow up to be doctors, teachers, scientists, and chefs/bakers. It's also worth noting that, despite more girls wanting to be doctors, there's twice as many male doctors compared to female doctors in America. And female doctors performing, on average, better than male counterparts.
Basically, biology should be playing a minuscule amount in representation within a field. All genders are equally qualified, it just appears that the societal narrative steers genders into different fields.
I feel like I should pipe up here.
These stereotypes that society has around gender roles (which you say is the societal pressure pushing people to pick jobs), where do they come from? Like most stereotypes, they're rooted in reality. In this case, rooted in biology. Instead of biology playing a small role, biology is playing the directing role.
I don't think it's controversial to say that stereotypes around gender roles have weakened significantly in the past half century. That said, the underlying biology the resulted in those stereotypes is still present. Our biology hasn't changed, but our society has. So boys still wanna be firefighters, girls still wanna be teachers.
Like I said earlier, I reckon that our unconscious biological pressures are more influential than societal pressures nowadays.
tldr; gender role stereotypes are just a manifestation of biology
Last edited by Ele; Jul 10, 2017 at 08:09 PM.