Gender roles refer to the social roles with which a person identifies relating to their gender. As social roles, they are “shared expectations that apply to persons who occupy a certain social position or are members of a particular social category” (Eagly 2000, p. 448). Gender roles exist at the intersection between subjective experience and cultural understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman, referring to a set of conditions that are broadly consensual within a culture. As such, gender roles are “injunctive norms” which depict how persons should behave, “[producing] social disapproval and efforts to induce compliance” if they are broken (Eagly 2000, p. 449).
However, gender roles imply more than rational self-conscious participation in societal patterns. They also include “general mannerisms, deportment and demeanor; play preferences and recreational interests; spontaneous topics of talk in unprompted conversation and casual comment; content of dreams, daydreams, and...
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Helsel, P.B. (2014). Gender Roles. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_258
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