Gender: Cultural and media influences on gender roles Flashcards
What is culture?
The rules, customs, morals and ways of interacting that bind together members, of a society or some other collection of people.
What is the media?
Tools used to store and distribute information. e.g books, films, TV commercials and so on.
What were Margaret Mead’s three findings?
Mead (1935) studied tribal groups in Papa New Guinea.
The Arapesh were gentle and responsive.
The Mundugumor were aggressive and hostile.
The Tchambuli women were dominant and they organised village life; men were passive.
The men were more overly dependent.
How does media present gender for women and men?
Media presents gender in different ways; males are more represented than females in most TV programmes including children’s programmes. Men are shown in a wider range of roles and often in higher-status positions than females.
Males are perceived as dominant, powerful, active, aggressive and sexual.
Women are presented as submissive, hurting, dependent and family orientated.
What’s Bandura’s Bobo doll study and how does it aid the understanding in gender roles?
Bandura’s bobo doll study lends some support to the theory of observation action learning.
The children imitated the behaviour of a model. Children were also more likely to imitate the same-sex model.
Gender differences included boys being more likely than girls, to imitate physical behaviour. With both genders imitating verbal behaviour.
What’s Perry and Bussey’s study and how does it aid the understanding in gender roles?
(media)
Showed film clips to children aged 8-9. In the film, boys and girls were seen selecting an apple and a pear, both gender-neutral items. Later, the children were given a choice of fruit. The boys selected the fruit they had seen another boy selecting, and the same for the girls. This shows that the children model gender behaviours they have observed in gender appropriate models.
