GENDER BIASNESS

Gender Biasness



Gender Biasness

Introduction

Most of the children learn basic components of the gender biasness that exist in their culture from the age of seven years. These basic components include the ideas and beliefs about men, women and different ethnic groups. It is more complex to learn about gender-typical personality characteristics, like sports, school tasks. Many children also learn about the stereotypes of their own gender earlier than learning about the stereotype of the other gender. Girls often know more about male stereotypes than boys know about female stereotypes. Children of both genders typically consider their own gender better and have more positive characteristics like boys are loud and messy, from girl's perspective, and girls are silly and dumb, from boy's perspective. However, when girls discover that after about age of ten years females are often devalued in our culture, their stereotypes about males may become more strong and positive than their stereotypes of females.

Discussion

A Story from Literature

Sleeping Beauty is the story being analyzed which is a fairy tale. The story is concerned about the beautiful girl wishing to meet charming prince. In Sleeping Beauty, her male companion, Price Phillip, awakes her from a deep sleep. This classic story contributes to the classic stereotyping of females being dependent on males. It not only lacks reality, but also it does not provide adequate role models for young girls.

How Children get aware of Stereotyping?

Children learn gender biasness which also includes ethnicity from their parents, other adults, peers, television and also by reading stories or books. Parents with stronger gender biasness typically have children with stronger gender biasness. Those Children having kind of mothers who are employed, especially girls, show less biased beliefs. Children probably learn some of the content of their gender stereotypes by simply observing the behaviors of the people around them and figure out which activities, occupations, characteristics, and so on, are associated with people of each gender. Parents and others may reward children for gender stereotyping, although in general parents seem to treat their male and female children fairly and similarly. One notable statement to this finding is that fathers often discourage boys from engaging in opposite-gender behavior. (Wasserman and Stern, 1978)

The motive behind researching about gender biasness in children's literature starts with a story of Caldecott winners, the Little Golden books, Newberry books and the etiquette books executed by Weitzman, Hokada and Ross. Since the rise of the ...