Key Concepts for the Sociology of Gender
As key components of social structure, statuses and roles allow us to organize
our lives in consistent, predictable ways. In combination with established norms,
they prescribe our behavior and ease interaction with people who occupy different
social statuses, whether we know these people or not. There is an insidious side to
this kind of predictable world. When normative role behavior becomes too rigidly
defined, our freedom of action is often compromised. These rigid definitions are
associated with the development of stereotypes—oversimplified conceptions that
people who occupy the same status group share certain traits in common. Although
stereotypes can include positive traits, they most often consist of negative ones that
are then used to justify discrimination against members of a given group. The
statuses of male and female are often stereotyped according to the traits they are
assumed to possess by virtue of their biological makeup. Women are stereotyped as
flighty and unreliable because they possess uncontrollable raging hormones that
fuel unpredictable emotional outbursts. The assignment of negative stereotypes can
result in sexism, the belief that the status of female is inferior to the status of male.
Males are not immune to the negative consequences of sexism, but females are more
likely to experience it because the status sets they occupy are more stigmatized than
those occupied by males. Compared to males, for example, females are more likely
to occupy statuses inside and outside their homes that are associated with less power,
less prestige, and less pay or no pay. Beliefs about inferiority due to biology are reinforced
and then used to justify discrimination directed toward females.