Gender-based parental restrictions and a passive gender stereotyping that seemed to have started in the family-nucleus has made its way to our societies, provoking an unintended negative effect on the way that many women feel in our society.
One of the many words that have a dislike effect on women is stereotyping women as a “minority” group. Especially when many times, the word minority has been used without the intellectual significance or origin of the world. While many in our society use to label women as a minority group, it has been conveniently interchangeably. The unmistakable true is that the word minority refers to social groups that “cannot engage and is not regarded as capable of engaging, the majority in a creative and constant dialogue,”[i] which women have countless demonstrated they are not.
What does it mean for women?
It means that women have been stereotyped with subjective and objective discriminations, allegedly powerless characteristics, labeling women as “subordinated” members of our societies.[ii] Unfortunately, modern societies are engraved with the sociocultural patterns of normative behavior that persuades and encourages women to feel like a minority group in our society. Well, I am resistant to believe that we cannot change the fact that women still feel chronically less powerful than men. While it seems almost impossible to change our core-culture, the key word here is “almost.” I think we can start making a real difference if we start changing the culture of new generations at home.
Through restrictive culturalism, I argue that the unconscious biases and preconceived distinctions that we found in our own cultural settings are cognitively linked to our distinctive family nucleus. Many moons ago, Polish-American Philosopher and Sociologist Florian Znaniecki (1919) explored the comprehensive framework grounding the foundation and meaning of culturalism. Znaniecki suggested that culturalism was “constructed on the ground of the implicit or explicit presuppositions involved in reflection about cultural phenomena.” Nuclear culturalism is a phenomenon that has unexpected intentions and sometimes, unwanted meanings. How many of us have heard in our family-nucleus, at least once someone said phrases such as, “only boys—or girls—can do that!” or “that’s not for boys—or girls!” or “you are not a boy—or a girl to do that,” without thinking that we might be starting some form of social restrictions.
Culturalism explores the agglomerate habits and traditions forming our human’s affairs. It centralizes our social nucleus, straightening bonds, and systems of shared values, including common territories, religion, language, descent, cultural traditions, economic interest, and political idealism.[iii] As members of our social groups, we create connections through sharing a collective consciousness, similar values, emotional attitudes, sentiments, desires, traditions, knowledge, and moral values.[iv] While within our cultures, may of our thinking and behaviors are culturally similar, there is no mistake that we still have “undeniably problems with culturalism” that can trap us into preconceived manifestations of common tendencies, limited determinism, and the essentialism of our cultural traits.[v]
Cultural restrictions enforce social, professional, and personal limitations. The conceptualization of restrictiveness was found in the work of many scholars who explained that restrictiveness was expected in the common cognitive behavior originated on specific social environments.[vi] In many societies, cultural restrictions and cultural taboos limit the expansion of women’s knowledge, discouraging women from speaking in public, vocalizing their ideas and needs, restricting women’s socioeconomic mobility, and other fundamental needs, such as access to public health.[vii] A patriarchally or matriarchally accepted philosophy behind cultural restrictions may explain the constructions that initiate gender distinctions, inducing the enforcement of boundaries and limitations, based on the preconception of social representations.[viii]
A great deal of research has shown that women’s cultural restrictions are predominant, influencing women’s conduct, social behavior, and their quality of life. Many have suggested that women internalized social norms, due to lack of perceived alternatives, provide a sense of limitations that ground the basis of women’s cultural restrictions.[ix] Family barriers and negative attitudes that hinder women’s empowerment, frequently limiting the support women need to success starts at home. My argument is that there is a cognitive likelihood that a gender-based parental restrictive multiculturalism and the constant socially stereotyping have an unintended effect on women’s feeling of powerlessness.
I interviewed more than 120 women from diverse cultural backgrounds, family origins, professional backgrounds, educational levels, sexual preferences, financial stability, different generations, conservatives, and modernistic. I asked each woman the same question: Why would you think a woman would feel chronically less powerful than men? I found that restrictive multiculturalism has a negative effect on the socioeconomic and sociopolitical development of women in American societies. Social restrictions against women not only have an adverse impact fon women’s advancement in the workplace, but also on women’s perception, mindset, and personal growth. Unfortunately, social and cultural gender-based restrictions seem to have set the boundaries for women’s social and professional failures. While many women believed that there are many social factors influencing women’s feeling of powerlessness, within my interviewees, there was a unanimous consensus that women’s feeling of chronical powerlessness was a cognitive, organic issue that most likely started at home. Their first life lesson included many social and cultural taboos, from playing with gender-specific, sometimes stereotyped toys, to the resentment fallacy that women are physical, intellectually, and occasionally endurance-based emotionally less capable than men just because of the nature of being a woman.
Family gender predisposition seems to be embedded in women and men since childhood. Family restrictions based on preconceived social demarcations seems common norms in all societies. What may appear to be an insignificant gender distinction in the family nucleus, frequently it can turn into a mentally restrictive gender stereotype, which is a problem commonly found at the family core in most cultures.[x] For example, some scholars believe that society in general, including parents, “accurately apply common gender stereotypes to toys, by the time they [the children] are three and readily predict their parents’ opinions about gender-typical and cross-gender play.”[xi] Many studies also showed that gender stereotyping, and differential vulnerabilities start during infancy, derives from parents, and most likely continue as an adult.[xii]
In some cultures, from childhood, women are denied the opportunity for development, inheriting their “mother’s disadvantages” during womanhood, including lack of education, illiteracy, and ignorance.[xiii]
It is the responsibility of new generations to start making changes in the way that family culture stereotype children, specifically, women. Women are physically and mentally capable of enduring the same challenges as the opposite gender. But first, women have to believe that they are as powerful as men. “Behaviour is not only the product of rational, deliberative and individual evaluation. It is also based on habit and cultural tradition, emotional impulses, the influence of family and friends and social norms as well as wider trends.”[xiv] Culture, belief, and traditions are passed from parental figures to childhood, into adulthood. Gender-specific culture is also transferred and perpetuated into adulthood.[xv]
Cultural restrictions based on gender-specific limitations must stop.
The social constructivism associated with learning theories, knowledge structure, and social interactions show that common cross-cultural learning patterns, mirroring gender stereotyping, and gender discrimination during childhood learning is carried into adulthood and social stream. Cultural restrictions based on gender-specifics should not be implied in the mind of the children. The moral values, cultural traditions, social ethics, stereotyping, bias, judgments, and gender-difference seems to be passively transmitted to our children. Family restrictive culture seems to be one a relevant, influential factor on women’s feeling of powerlessness.
Social stereotyping, profiling and gender-labeling status are likely to have an adverse effect on women’s feeling of powerlessness, as well as in women’s professional and personal development.
Many of those cultural feelings are carried-on in the workplace with the mindset that what we hear is what we believe. Those cultural restrictions not only have a damaging effect on women’s empowerment, but those restrictions also contribute to professional inequality and gender gap issues.
The time to start changing the mentality of future generations is now. At home.
Societies are changing and so should we. Women, as well as men, need to reset their mental approach to gender to completely comprehend that cultural changes require common collective and cooperative social strategies.[xvi] Now is the time to start changing the mind of our children. Let imprint in our kids an “equality-mentality” and a “gender-neutral approach” to future professional development. Now is the time to stop vandalizing our gender-based culturalism and stop thinking about any social group as a “minority group.” Now is the time to stop gender stereotyping, along with the sociocultural restriction that limits the personal and professional parameters of women in our society. We, together are one cross-functional social team where each gender has a unique characteristic essential for the growth and development of societies around the world. Let begin by re-setting our minds. Let start by respecting and appreciating each other, regardless of the gender, as an important member of our society.
Iberkis Faltas
[i] Addis, A. (1991). Individualism, communitarianism, and the rights of ethnic minorities. Notre Dame L. Rev., 67(3), 615-676
[ii] (Addis, 1991)
Christiano, T. (2015). Democracy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/democracy/
Hacker, H. M. (1951). Women as a minority group. Social Forces, 30(1), 60–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2571742
Prati, G., Marín Puchades, V., & Pietrantoni, L. (2017). Cyclists as a minority group? Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 47, 34-41. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2017.04.008
Song, S. (2017). Multiculturalism.The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) (Spring 2017). Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/multiculturalism.
[iii] Barker, C. (2004). The SAGE dictionary of cultural studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc. & Znaniecki, F. (1939). Social groups as products of participating individuals. American Journal Of Sociology, 44(6), 799-811.
[iv] (Znaniecki, 1935)
[v] Chemla, K., & Fox, E. F., (2017) (Eds.) Culture without culturalism: The making of scientific knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
[vi] Garritson, S. (1987). Characteristics of restrictiveness management of the mentally ill. Journal Of Psychosocial Nursing & Mental Health Services, 25(1), 10-43.
[vii] Harchandani, N. (2012). Oral health challenges in Pakistan and approaches to these problems. Pakistan Oral & Dental Journal, 32(3), 497-501.
Jewitt, S. (2000). Unequal knowledges in Jharkhand, India: De-romanticizing women's agroecological expertise. Development & Change, 31(5). Retrieved from www.ebscohost.com.
MacKian, S. C. (2008). What the papers say: Reading therapeutic landscapes of women's health and empowerment in Uganda. Health & place, 14(1), 106-115.
[viii] Gentile, F. R. (2017). Marketing the talented tenth: WEB Du Bois and public-intellectual economies. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47(2), 131-157.
[ix] Wilkens, E. A. (1997). A gender analysis of perceived quality of life: some theoretical and methodological observations from villages in the Garhwal, India. University of Calgary. Retrieved from http://dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/26913/1/24629Wilkens.pdf
[x] Campenni, C. E. (1999). Gender stereotyping of children's toys: A comparison of parents and nonparents. Sex Roles, 40(1-2), 121-138.
[xi] Freeman, N. K. (2007). Preschoolers’ perceptions of gender appropriate toys and their parents’ beliefs about genderized behaviors: Miscommunication, mixed messages, or hidden truths?. Early Childhood Education Journal, 34(5), 357-366.
[xii] Wood, Desmarais, & Gugula, 2002). Sheeber, L., Davis, B., & Hops, H. (2002). Gender-specific vulnerability to depression in children of depressed mothers. Children of depressed parents: Mechanisms of risk and implications for treatment, 253-274. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net
Wood, E., Desmarais, S., & Gugula, S. (2002). The impact of parenting experience on gender stereotyped toy play of children. Sex Roles, 47(1-2), 39-49
[xiii] Abioye, T. (1999). Examining the mass literacy programme in Zaria local government area of Kaduna state implications for women empowerment. A Journal of the Reading Association of Nigeria. 8(1 & 2), 201-213.
[xiv] Uzzell, D., & Räthzel, N. (2009). Transforming environmental psychology. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 29(3), 340-350. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2008.11.005
[xv] Chamlee, E. (1993). Indigenous African institutions and economic development. CATO Journal, 13(1), 79.
[xvi] AlSaqer, L. (2008). Experience of female public relations practitioners in Bahrain. Public Relations Review, 34(1), 77-79.
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