The Influences of Culture and Media on Gender roles

• Perry and Bussey found that children picked the item that they’d seen a model of the same gender pick.
• Fagot and Leinbach found a positive correlation between a child’s stereotypical gender behaviour, and the stereotypical gender behaviour of their parents.
• Martin et al.’s study suggested that gender-appropriate behaviours are learned through direct instructions.
• Behaving in a gender-appropriate way is often rewarded. Whereas behaving outside the gender-appropriate way is often punished.
• Rewards for behaving in gender-stereotyped ways act as vicarious reinforcement.
• McGhee and Frueh used a series of short stories to investigate children’s gender stereotypes. and found the more tv watched correlated with whether they held a gender stereotype.
• Factors like family structure and the communities people live in are examples of participant variables, which might also be confounding variables . when referring to the influence of Culture and Media on Gender Roles.
• Limitations on studying the influence of media

  Most of these studies are natural experiments

  • Participants cannot be randomly allocated
  • There may be confounding variables
  • Hard to test cause and effect

  It is difficult to establish a control group
• Williams’ study shows that watching TV strengthens gender stereotypes. Williams studied children in a town before and after TV was introduced for the first time.
• In 1986, Williams conducted a longitudinal study into the effect of the introduction of TV on the strength of Gender stereotypes. She studied in an isolated town in Canada.
• Outline the social learning theory explanation of gender.

  The social learning theory of gender says that we learn gender-appropriate behaviours by observing and imitating models of the same gender.
• The social roles expected of men and women are influenced by culture. Different cultures have different social roles which are passed down from generation to generation.
• If expectations of men and women were different in the three tribes, it would suggest that culture has some influence on gender roles. If expectations of men and women were the same in the three tribes, it would suggest that gender roles are more likely to be biologically determined.
• Mead et al (1935) studied 3 tribes and found that each tribe had differing gender roles. The results of Mead et al.'s study suggest that culture influences gender roles.
• When someone focusses on their own cultural perspective, we call it Ethnocentrism.
• Limitations of Mead et al's study...

  • Its validity may have been reduced by the fact that the researcher might have viewed the tribes from a Western viewpoint. (Ethnocentrism)
  • Participants may have been affected by demand characteristics and investigator effects.
• Williams and Best found more similarities than differences between all of the countries they studies. What does this suggest?


  This suggests that the influence of culture on gender roles is weak.
• Mead et al. studied the traditional gender roles within three tribes in Papua New Guinea. They observed the behaviour of men and women in each tribe and they conducted interviews. They found that gender roles were very different between the three tribes, which suggests that culture has an effect on gender roles.