Gender Norms and Gendered Preferences
From a young age, men and women are socialized into specific gender roles that dictate how they should act. These gender roles then cause men and women to develop gendered preferences for work, or preferences based on the gender norms they have been socialized to accept. These gendered preferences then lead to gendered choices, in which women choose primarily occupations that are both lower in pay and lower in status.
Read more about this topic: Occupational Segregation, Causes
Famous quotes containing the words gender, norms and/or preferences:
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“For those parents from lower-class and minority communities ... [who] have had minimal experience in negotiating dominant, external institutions or have had negative and hostile contact with social service agencies, their initial approaches to the school are often overwhelming and difficult. Not only does the school feel like an alien environment with incomprehensible norms and structures, but the families often do not feel entitled to make demands or force disagreements.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“This is the great truth life has to teach us ... that gratification of our individual desires and expression of our personal preferences without consideration for their effect upon others brings in the end nothing but ruin and devastation.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)