The Societal Eye Of Gender Stereotypes and Expectations

 

With Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as presidential candidates, I do start to wonder how much gender plays a role when trying to determine who will be the next president of the United States. In connection with the article, Gender Stereotypes, Information Search, and Voting Behavior in Political Campaigns, I have taken a sociological course called “Gender in Society” and this course helped me broaden my understanding about societal expectations between males and females. I took away several things from that course that I can connect to this article such as “Doing Gender,” “Gender as a System of Oppression”, and “Gender as a Social Construct”. Referring back to these terms from that course, “Doing Gender” referred to things you do to show society your gender and conforming or not conforming to gender roles. Gender as a system of oppression explained that for women, being sensitive is one of the limited assets that are given to them and if women are not sensitive, society doubts that they are not perhaps real women. Lastly, gender as a social construct explains how gender is shaped and reconstructed out of human interaction and social life. The article states, “Women are perceived as more empathetic and less decisive than men while men are seen as more assertive and rational than woman… at the same time they are perceived as less competent and experienced, less able to handle the emotional demands of high office, and lacking in masculine traits like ‘toughness’ “(Ditonto et al 338). Here, you can see how this connects to what I explained about societal expectations and how this may alter the voter’s decisions based on gender. Even though society has expectations for certain genders, I feel that people of any gender do not have to abide by them and can go against societal expectations just like how Hillary Clinton is doing by being female presidential candidate.