I always thought babies were born as blank slates and the parents molded and taught them gender roles, etc.
I had two boys. We didn't allow guns in the house. We didn't talk about them, just basically ignored their existence. The first time the oldest got some Lego blocks, he built a gun! We had plenty of toys and dolls etc, and he always went for the cars and traditionally "male" toys. We didn't encourage it, he wasn't in childcare, he was just "like that."
My best friend had two girls, the same ages. The wanted to do the girly things when they came over.
We moved away and had two girls. Meanwhile my friend had some boys. She later called and apologized for all the things she had said about my parenting. I was amazed at how different and easier girls were.
I have always been a women's libbist, and have a degree in chemistry. But I had to admit I was wrong about the blank slate idea.
My second son did have a period when his sister was born when he was inseparable from his baby doll, that he dragged around by the leg.He refused to put clothes on it, so I had to crochet a little dress directly onto the doll because I didn't like her being naked all the time.
And my older daughter insisted on climbing trees and couldn't STAND dolls. She is like me, not a girly girl at all. But the older one now has a degree in linguistics and is choosing to stay at home and raise children while her husband works. They hope to get a big horsefarm someday and work together doing tourist rides in Alaska.
Despite my women's libbist tendencies, I have LOVED being a mom and my kids are wonderful, so I must have done something right. My brother-in-law stayed home with the kids while my sister worked, and that worked for them.
The bottom line is that boys and girls ARE overall wired differently, but there is some overlap. There will always be traditionally female and male roles, but also with some overlap. The one thing we can do to really screw up society is to have quotas. The best thing to do is to encourage each person to follow their heart.
Nowadays gender roles are shown as a global problem and therefore a lot of people are trying to break the system and act differently. But is that possible? Can one really go against nature itself?
To begin with, our roles are assigned from the birth, when girls are told to behave properly, while brash behaviour among boys is often encouraged. That affects the jobs we choose - it's very rare to meet a male caretaker, or say, a female builder. Moreover, as was said above, our physical entity is important, too. It was scientifically proven that women are more capable of nursing and raising a child rather than men. Or the fact that men are typically taller and stronger than women, making it possible to do a hard labour.
Nevertheless, the world around us is changing and drastically so. Firstly, many psychologists state that the environment the person was brought up in affects his visualisation of self, of male or female. There are terms such as toxic masculinity (which by the way means the negative influence of masculine behaviour) of which we are trying to get rid of. For example, the amount of women in STEM (science, technologies, engineering, and maths) is increasing day by day, because there is societal acceptability, society is ready to change and offer equality among genders.
Just remember that "the blue is for boys and pink is for girls" were set thousands of years ago. But that doesn't mean we can't change them today, in the era of globalization.
