Can gender socialization solve gender gap in society ?
Sienna
Today, people say "modern society enables human beings to defend their own dignity." But is it true? No until now, a gender gap exists. First, I want to start with my own story. Looking back at freshman year in university, I will never forget the first day of naval architecture. one of my friends came over to me and said, "Shipbuilding is a male dominated field. And I found women engineers performed poorly compared to men." The man do not know well, who I am, but he already judged me by sex because of deep rooted conventional thought. Today there is still glamorous gender discrimination in our society. Let me ask one question, do you think we can solve this gender gap in our society? In my view, we can solve this problem.
To solve this problem, we need a holistic approach about men and women. So I will explain why men and women so different. The prevailing explanation is gender socialization. Scientists believe that human nature is a blank slate. Male and female are born identical except for a few anatomical differences. According to this explanation, men and women think and behave differently because they have been socialized differently by culture and society. It turns out that gender socialization lead to a gender gap in our society. There is an eminent example. when a newborn baby takes its first breath of life, they begin treating in accordance with gender stereotypes. Girls are given pink sleepy hats and boys blue ones. Once the child enters school, the gender socialization process reaches hyper speed. Boys learn to be boys and girls learn to be girls. By the time the child has reached high school, they have already experienced so many instances of gender discrimination and inequality in general. Upon entering the work force, these now men and women, are practically in totally different worlds with different world-views. Gender differences become strikingly apparent. As people aged, gender socialization accentuates, solidities and perpetuates gender roles.
There are some people who think men and women are hardwired to be different so gender gap is natural thing in our society. However, according to scientists there is no gap between men and women in nature. Scientists argue men and women are socialized differently, so that they are different. This means, if parents and society provide more gender-neutral socialization, there will be no differences between men and women.
In other words, without the gender socialization of little boys and little girls into strictly defined gender roles, society would be considerably different. A child would be treated simply as a human being, they can be anything in life depending on their own innate abilities and motives to succeed without any barriers. With the passing of time, the gender gap will fade away with the decline of rigid gender socialization and finally they treated equally in our society.