Title: Gender Role | Cultural Anthropology
Headings: Gender Role
Gender Role
Background
References

Content: Gender roles are culturally specific, and while most cultures distinguish only two (boy and girl or man and woman), others recognize more. Androgyny, for example, has been proposed as a third gender. Other societies have claimed to see more than five genders, and some non-Western societies have three genders – man, woman and third gender. Some individuals (not necessarily being from such a culture) identify with no gender at all. Gender role – defined as referring in some sense to cultural expectations according to an understood gender classification – should not be confused with gender identity, the internal sense of one’s own gender, which may or may not align with categories offered by societal norms. The point at which these internalized gender identities become externalized into a set of expectations is the genesis of a gender role. Gender roles are usually referenced in a pejorative sense, as an institution that restricts freedom of behavior and expression, or are used as a basis for discrimination. Because of the prevailing gender role of general subordination, women were not granted the right to vote in many parts of the world until the 19th or 20th centuries, some well into the 21st. Women throughout the world, in myriad respects, do not enjoy full freedom and protection under the law. Contrariwise because of the prevailing perception of men as primarily breadwinners, they are seldom afforded the benefit of paternity leave.