The Inflluence of Culture & Media on Gender Development (AQA A Level Psychology): Revision Note

Culture & gender roles

• Culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, and practices of a particular group or society that shape individual behaviour and attitudes 

• If gender is learnt through socialisation, identification and internalisation, then the surrounding culture will influence gender development, lending support to the argument that gender is a social construct

• While the sex categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ are recognised in all cultures, suggesting a universal understanding of gender, the gender roles associated with these  sex categories can vary cross-culturally

• In Sweden, many fathers raise small children during a generously paid paternity leave while their wives or partners go back to work, giving the children they are raising a non-traditional view of the male gender role

Media & gender roles

• Media forms, such as television, magazines, books, social media and music, shape and reinforce gender roles

  • Males are more represented in most TV programmes, including children’s programmes, and in most children’s books

  • Children who watch a lot of television, play video games or spend a lot of time on social media may develop more stereotypical ideas of  gender roles

  • Both females and males are usually portrayed in a gender-stereotypical way, with girls being more passive than boys, who are shown as more aggressive and dominant than girls

• Media is gradually including more diverse gender representation, although traditional binary portrayals still dominate

Research which investigates the influence of culture on gender development

• Mead (1935) studied three tribes in Papua New Guinea and found that gender roles varied dramatically across cultures:

  • The Arapesh: both sexes gentle, cooperative and 'feminine' by Western standards

  • The Mundugumor: both sexes aggressive, hostile and 'masculine'

  • The Tchambuli: gender roles reversed: women were dominant and assertive, men were passive and emotionally expressive

• Whiting & Edwards (1988) conducted a cross-cultural study that suggested  it was culturally universal for girls to be encouraged into child-caring roles and  boys to be socialised into tasks like looking after animals

Research which investigates the influence of media on gender development

• Williams (1986) conducted a natural experiment in a small Canadian town nicknamed 'Notel', which had no television until 1973. She measured children's gender role attitudes before and after the introduction of TV, comparing them with children in two control towns where TV was already present

  • Notel children showed a significant increase in gender stereotyping after TV was introduced, while control town children's attitudes remained stable

• Steinke et al. (2008) conducted a content analysis of fourteen popular TV science programmes and found that 58% of scientists shown were male, and male scientists were portrayed with the masculine qualities of independence and dominance

• Lewis et al. (2021) concluded that the majority of the 247 children’s books they investigated reflected gender stereotypes, with male activities seen as gender neutral, while books about girls containing more specifically female material

Evaluation of the influence of culture and media on gender development

Strengths

• Mead's (1935) research across the Arapesh, Mundugumor and Tchambuli tribes showed that gender roles varied dramatically between cultures, ranging from both sexes being gentle, to both being aggressive, to Western gender roles being reversed

  • This supports the argument that gender roles are culturally constructed and learned through socialisation, undermining biological explanations that treat gender roles as innate

• Cultural and media explanations can account for gradual changes in gender roles over time, e.g., as fathers and mothers increasingly share or swap traditional roles, children are exposed to a wider range of gender models in both family life and media

  • This shows that culture and media have explanatory flexibility for cultural and historical change in gender roles in a way that biological explanations cannot, since gender roles can shift within a generation if the role models available to children change

Limitations

• Much of the evidence for media's influence on gender stereotypes is correlational, e.g., children who consume more stereotyped media also tend to hold more stereotyped beliefs

  • This means cause and effect cannot always be firmly established, since pre-existing beliefs may lead children to seek out particular media rather than the media causing the stereotypes

• Cross-cultural research relies heavily on naturalistic observation, which is vulnerable to researcher bias

  • Mead's (1935) work in particular has been criticised for being influenced by her own preconceptions, and her later work softened her strong cultural relativism position, suggesting cross-cultural findings should be interpreted cautiously

Issues & Debates

• The influence of culture and media exemplifies the nurture side of the nature vs nurture debate, showing how social and environmental factors shape gender identity

  • If gender roles differ significantly between societies and change over time, this undermines biological determinism

• Media may be seen as environmentally deterministic, shaping children’s understanding of gender without conscious choice

  • However, growing representation of diverse gender identities in media suggests that individuals may be influenced, but not controlled, allowing for personal agency and free will in gender identity development