Boys: the brave, the math wizard, and the sports enthusiast, the leader. Girls: the finessed, the weak, the orator, the follower. These are some stereotypes with respect to gender. Though people living in the modern era are considered to be leveled equally, the question remains, is there really equal treatment to both boys and girls? Reality check, there still exist the struggle for gender equality.
The supposedly ground for imbuing equality becomes a promoter of gender bias and inequality. How ironic.
Socialization is considered to be a life-long process of interaction of an individual to his environment. And the individual’s personality greatly depends on his early socialization. Among the various agents of socialization, school is considered as the most influential in the early socialization, thus, adversely affects the gender role of children.
Children are being nurtured at home, thus, they used to carry gender preferences. But when they will have to interact on a new environment such as school, they are taught to follow what the norms, both folkways and mores, dictate them. Here is where gender biases seem to arise.
There are some factors that are significantly accountable in molding their gender preferences, and, ultimately show gender bias. These are seen within biological nature of human being and societal conventional wisdom imparted in the educational curriculum. For instance, girls are encouraged to do light tasks and play less tiring games. In some schools, Home Economics subjects tend to teach the girls to do home-oriented tasks like cooking, which is less tiring compared with activities on carpentry that are taught to boys. On the other hand, girls are allowed to play volleyball rather than basketball, and softball rather than baseball. While in the way of dressing up, girls are being motivated to wear skirts and blouses, which is somehow being associated to their behaviors. This means that girls are expected to be neat, finessed, and fine because this is the culture most teachers teach them as the appropriate gender preferences for the respective sex. And if they will not do as such, they will scolded or even suffer some sorts of discrimination.
This kind of treatment to girls boosts their gender preferences, which they will soon carry to the future during their college life, in the workplace, and the rest of their lives though some preferences may change overtime depending on how influential new environments are to them.
