Gender typecasting

[Profraine]

Something that I've noticed over that past few months is an inability for people to think that other people, when they aren't portraying their gender's stereotypical ideals, aren't seen sympathetically or at least inferior until they "fix" themselves to be more in line to "what their gender is supposed to be like".

Take, for example, someone who is more active and someone who's more passive:

- If the two people were males, the active male would be an achiever who works hard to overcome obstacles in order to make a living; the passive male would be considered someone who is weak and takes no initiative.

- Now with females, the passive one would be considered comforting, always willing to help out someone and a good housekeeper; the active female would be expendable and be considered in over her head.

now these might seem a little blown out, but I've noticed this kind of behavior with the people I work with. While a nice chunk of them are males (I work for the Navy, mind you, so 5 females in the workplace out of 50 isn't out of place), I still see a lot of gender typecasting going on at work, despite (or maybe because of) the professionalism of my workplace.

Now your thoughts:


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Links relating to the topic:
One (out of many) Dateline video proving men are helped less often than women:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-57-i...feature=relmfu

An article showing that people are less harsh on woman than men:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0525090554.htm

[devonin]

There was a point in early human development when gender roles were more important, when the physiological differences were relevent because the things humans were hunting for food -needed- big burly muscular people to be able to kill them, and for the survival of the species, the females needed to be kept out of harm's way so they could stay alive long enough to make babies.

These are no longer concerns facing humanity, but it's difficult for 200 years of societal development to overcome 16000 years of evolutionary imperative.

[Evnoir]

Gender typecasting, as devonin pointed out, is something anatomically modern humans developed over the past few millenuems. The cognitive evolution that occured during those times made us what we are today.

Personally, I believe that the prevalence of sexual dimorphism made humans associate certain traits for each genders. Before Neolithic era, men and women were searching for food together, revealing that both genders were treated 'equally' in a sense. Although, when farming first started to spread across the globe in the Neolithic era, men went out of their villages to gather food while women stayed inside their village to farm. Progressively, the women were assigned less 'man-like' work, and were bound to more 'woman-like' work.

Gender bias occurs far too often in the society we live in today; it makes me sick just thinking about how much gender typecasting causes an effect on how humans are viewed. I've noticed this case far too often: a man getting a significantly longer sentence to prison than a woman with the same charges. Not just in court, jobs are probably the most gender-biased things in the world. For business opportunities/interviews, if a woman shares the same qualities as a man competing for the same position, woman > man. In addition, there is also this factor in business interviews: aesthetics > personality. The scary part is, this is statistically proven by multiple researchers.

The video posted in the OP is just shocking. The fact that you can clearly see the drug being poured in -- and no actions!? The last part with the woman interupting the girlfriend proved that there is 'some' hope in humanity.

I absolutely hate how society works like that, but there's not much we can do about it - that's just how humans are. Gender typecasting occurs even to ridiculous extents. So I only have one thing left to say about this topic:

Keep your coins - I want change.

[who_cares973]

i see this all the time at work its ridiculous and it gets on my nerves because it ruins the opportunity for any person to show that they are capable of handling various types of jobs which in turn may help them move up in the company.


also id adopt a girl because ive wanted a daughter ever since my sister was born heh.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by devonin

There was a point in early human development when gender roles were more important, when the physiological differences were relevent because the things humans were hunting for food -needed- big burly muscular people to be able to kill them, and for the survival of the species, the females needed to be kept out of harm's way so they could stay alive long enough to make babies.

These are no longer concerns facing humanity, but it's difficult for 200 years of societal development to overcome 16000 years of evolutionary imperative.

this

[Cenright]

**Though it does not bear any difference to my argument, as I am only speaking about the present of "what is", and NOT "what happened", I will say that I do not believe in evolution, nor any theories that might be extrapolations or even sheer guesswork of what someone 'believes' some bone fragments seem to tell us. I will try to stick to facts known at the present time, evolution can be debated in another thread, though I will want no part that thread.**




Now I will be one of the first to say that actions and treatment between genders is badly skewed, even in some of the most "socially advanced" countries on Earth.

I will also say, that exact equality between the two genders is impossible in this system of things.

No matter what you do, can you make an Apple equal to an Orange, or vice-versa? No matter what you do, Apple producers and Orange producers will have a different opinion on what equal is.

Men and Women are different. As a whole, they respond to the same stimulus differently. They grow differently. Their hormones, while similar, are in totally different proportions in their body, and affect them differently.
_ _ _

Example: Higher levels of Testosterone have been linked to better spatial capabilities.
Does that mean all guys read maps better? No, but it will be a natural strength, though we all know that strengths need to be trained to be brought out, and it doesn't take into account aptitudes either.

For all you gamers out there, it wouldn't affect the base aptitudes of a person, but you could consider it the "Low/Med/High Testosterone buff", +2/5/8% Spatial Potential.
There are other strengths too, linked to levels of Estrogen.
_ _ _

No matter what, in a competition, people play to their strengths. When two people seem about equal, whatever the competition is, they try to use what they are better at, to gain an edge. What that is for a man, and what that is for a woman, are generally different. (Though there are areas of overlap.)


With all the factors that affect someone growing up, the small differences actually add up to what I would say is a fairly large difference between the genders, the only way that you could truly be fair in some cases, is to do things on a case-by-case basis, and usually it ends up with you treating the two genders differently, even to be equally fair.

Sometimes you have to treat them differently, just to be fair, though still only a mild difference in treatment.


(I will remind you though that from the start I said that I believe this difference to have been taken to far, and what you deem as 'typecasting' is the reactions to the natural differences being blown way out of proportion.)

[Emithith]

I have to say, that if you treated a woman like a man, the woman would cry foul, and vice-versa from a male. Interesting CT. I wish men and women were equal, but it would take an army of people that believe the same thing to change that.

P.S. the point of the poll was..?

[Cavernio]

"With all the factors that affect someone growing up, the small differences actually add up to what I would say is a fairly large difference between the genders, the only way that you could truly be fair in some cases, is to do things on a case-by-case basis, and usually it ends up with you treating the two genders differently, even to be equally fair."

I wouldn't call gender differences innately 'large'; I wouldn't call non-innate gender differences 'large' either for that matter, and that's with saying that the more different you treat men and women, the more differences you will see.
I don't think that if we could treat each person as an individual that we would find males as a group being treated differently as females of a group. It would be simple enough to test experimentally; the participant would be told chat with people either online or either using voice scrambling software to ask whatever questions they'd like to learn about them, but the only thing they couldn't ask about would be their gender. After x duration of time, they then answer a question about what they would do in a set scenario using the person they just talked to placed in a certain role. You get the participant to do with multiple times with multiple 'mystery' people. Sure the methodology needs tweaking, put some controls in, ask the participant if they assumed the person was either gender at the end of it. I bet you we wouldn't find people guessing correctly the gender of the individual much more than random chance, and I bet you we'd find that what the participant thought the gender was of the person would have far more bearing on how they say they would treat that person than what the person's actual gender was in the hypothetical situation.

"'typecasting' is the reactions to the natural differences being blown way out of proportion."

And I'd say that typecasting is far more mired in social development than any natural differences.

Finally, each person should always be treated individually, and that means being open enough to throw out early conceptions you have about someone, which are often based on their appearance and therefore gender, once you learn something different about them, instead of trying to fit in new stuff you learn about them into early, not well-informed ideas of them.

[Kilroy_x]

Gender is a nonsense concept. It's metaphysical. A god of the gaps. The fact that it's also the common language of discourse on any subject which might concern either gender or sex or both kind of negates the legitimacy of any discussion on the subject, including this one.

Also OP you're kind of building a case on a series of anecdotes which is also bad. The military is a joke. Unless you're ROTC or going through West Point or something it's either just a job, or else it's something a person is attracted to for the culture due to a deep psychological deficiency of one kind or another. At least a third of the people in the armed forces belong in prison.

Agreeing with Cenright that Evolutionary Psychology is protoscience. Making a series of inferences about long-dead organisms and their relationship to living ones leaves a fair amount of room for error.

[Cavernio]

The topic reminded me of something I believe an old friend read about/heard from a prof, but which ties in with what I was saying about how people perceive genders and about how people make judgements about people based on appearance, but people think attractive people's problems are less serious or problematic than comparatively unattractive people's.

[reuben_tate]

Originally Posted by Cenright

Sometimes you have to treat them differently, just to be fair, though still only a mild difference in treatment.

The whole point of equality is to treat people equally, even though are not necessarily equal. And the thing is that no one is equal to another in terms of every characteristic. People have their strengths and weaknesses, but that doesn't change the fact that we should still treat people equally.

[devonin]

You're missing the difference between 'equal' and 'identical'
You can treat people equally without treating them identically, and treating them identically creates its own entirely seperate set of problems.

[SKG_Scintill]

Boy, because I know of 4 names to give boys and only 2 for girls

[cornmaker]

gender doesn't matter to me. if it's a boy then i would just have to deal with it and shower him with love.
treating depends on the situation. it would be nice to treat them equally but sometimes it really depends on the situation.