Gender
Senior 4 · General and Religious Studies
Gender
Lesson 2 of 3
35 min
Complete these sentences in your head, as fast as you can:
Most people finish all three in a second. Nobody taught these endings in a lesson, and no science book contains them, yet we all know them. That speed is the evidence for this lesson's main idea: ideas about how women and men should behave are learned, every day, from the people and things around us. Some of those ideas describe useful roles; others become stereotypes that shrink people's lives.
Definition
Gender roles: the tasks and responsibilities a society expects of women and men, girls and boys. Example: who farms, who cooks, who leads a meeting.
Gender norms: the unwritten rules of a group about how women and men "should" behave, with approval for those who follow them and disapproval for those who do not.
Gender stereotype: in the words of Rwanda's National Gender Policy, "ascribing certain attributes, characteristics and roles to people based on their gender". The policy gives negative examples ("women are bad drivers, men can't change diapers") and ones that sound kind ("women are better caregivers, men are stronger"), and adds that a stereotype "becomes harmful when it limits a person's life choices".
Socialisation: the lifelong process by which people learn the values, norms and roles of their society. The family, school, peers, media and religious community are its agents.
Unpaid care work: caring for people and the home without pay: cooking, cleaning, fetching water, caring for children, the sick and the elderly.
The planner Caroline Moser, in Gender Planning and Development (1993), showed that women in low-income households often carry a triple role. Her three categories are a useful way to describe anyone's work.
| Role | What it covers | Rwandan examples |
|---|---|---|
| Productive | Work that produces goods, services or income | Farming, trading at the market, teaching, driving a motorcycle taxi |
| Reproductive (care) | Bearing and raising children and keeping the household going; usually unpaid | Cooking, fetching water, caring for a sick relative, helping children with homework |
| Community | Work for the community and its decisions | Umuganda, village assemblies, church or mosque committees, local leadership |
Only the first is counted as "work" in most economic statistics, so a person who spends the day on care and community tasks can look as if they "do nothing". The National Gender Policy disagrees: unpaid care tasks "are considered work, because theoretically one could pay a third person to perform them".
The Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey 2019–20 measured part of this difference: 23% of employed women, against 8% of employed men, received no payment for their work, often because they worked on the family farm.
Three different things are often confused.
| Kind of statement | Test | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Sex difference | Biological; true in every society | "Women can breastfeed." |
| Gender role | Describes who does a task in a society now; can change | "In many families the mother cooks." |
| Gender stereotype | A belief that all members of a sex are, or should be, a certain way | "Men cannot cook." "Girls are bad at physics." |
A role becomes a stereotype when "many do" turns into "all must" or "none can".
Look at the photograph again. In many homes, cooking is seen as a woman's task, yet this man cooks as his paid job, and men work as cooks and chefs in hotels and camps. The same task can change "gender" when it moves from unpaid to paid. That is strong evidence that the role is social, not biological.
| Agent of socialisation | How it can pass on stereotypes | How it can challenge them |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Girls given the chores, boys sent out to play; "boys don't cry" | Sharing chores between daughters and sons; fathers caring for babies |
| School | Textbook pictures of male doctors and female nurses; teachers expecting boys to lead | Mixed leadership roles; examples of women engineers and men nurses |
| Peers | Teasing a boy who likes cooking or a girl who plays football | Friends who defend each other's choices |
| Media and advertising | Adverts showing only women cleaning and only men driving | Stories and adverts with women and men in every role |
| Religious community | Some readings of tradition reserve some roles for one sex | Teaching on the equal dignity of women and men (Lesson 1) |
| Language and sayings | Proverbs and jokes that mock one sex | Questioning a saying instead of repeating it |
Once learned, a stereotype protects itself. Figure 2 shows the cycle.
The cycle explains a pattern GMO reports: women were 41.7% of TVET trainees in 2023, and "gender stereotypes and practices are still observed, which hinder women's participation in male-dominated trades". The cycle can be broken at any step; the easiest place is different treatment, which families and schools control.
Warning
Common mistakes
Important
Discuss. Keep a 24-hour record of who in your household does each task, including fetching water, cooking, earning money and attending meetings. Sort the tasks into Moser's three roles. Which tasks are shared? Which are done by one sex only, and is the reason biological or social?
AMAZE: "Gender Roles and Stereotypes", about 2 minutes. Pause after each example in the film and decide: is this a sex difference, a role or a stereotype?
Practice
Key points
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the opening, Figure 2, the tables, the analysis and the exercises.
This lesson adapts CC BY-SA material and is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Quick check
Match each statement to what it is.
Tap one on the left, then its partner on the right.
