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SEX-ROLE STEREOTYPING

Before reading further, take a moment to complete Lab Activity 6.3: Abilities and Aptitudes Desirable for Men and Women. This will help you determine the degree to which you possess stereotypical thinking.
You may be surprised to learn that sex-role stereotyping can be bad for your health. Then again, if you have experienced it, you may not be surprised. Stereotyping begins as soon as a baby is born and a blue or pink ribbon is placed on his or her bassinet. From that point on, boys and girls are treated differently. There are numerous examples of this different treatment, but perhaps the most obvious and the one whose effects are quite dramatic is what occurs in school. Researchers tell us that teachers praise boys more often than they do girls, that they give boys more academic help than they give girls, and that they accept boys' comments to a greater extent than they accept girls' comments during classroom discussions.
The effect of these teacher behaviors is that boys are eight times more likely to call out answers, a sign of the self-confidence they develop. Conversely, girls lose self-esteem. A study conducted by the American Association of University Women found that 49 percent of elementary school girls said they felt proud of their schoolwork, whereas only 12 percent of high school girls said they felt such pride. A frightening statistic is that adolescent girls are four to five times as likely to attempt suicide than adolescent boys and, both during adolescence and adulthood, females have a higher rate of depression than do males.
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