As men and women grow into adulthood, they tend to derive their gender identity primarily in two realms—their careers and their family lives. Although many believe that ideas about gender are firmly established by the time we reach adulthood, recent social changes in sex roles show that adults do have the capacity to revise their thoughts about gender roles.
One area of research that has been tracking gender differences is in television commercials (Bartsch et al., 2000). These studies have found that women are overrepresented in commercials of domestic products and are underrepresented in commercials of all other product types. Characters in television commercials are portrayed as having more authority if they are white or male. In fact, there are well-established stereotypes in today’s commercials—white men have been viewed as powerful; white women as sex objects; African American men as aggressive; and African American women as inconsequential (Coltrane & Messineo, 2000). Interestingly, women and men with traditional gender roles (who score higher on measures of masculinity and femininity) have been found to respond more favorably to gender-stereotyped advertising (Morrison & Shaffer, 2003).
For many years in Western society, men were encouraged to develop careers, whereas women (insofar as they have been encouraged to work at all) were taught to get a job that would occupy their time until marriage and children remove them from the workforce. The tendency still exists, especially in traditional women who are more fem-
inine, to choose low-prestige occupations and/or subordinate their careers to their husbands’. One study found that a woman’s career intentions have been found to be influenced by her gender role attitudes and her perceptions of both her parents’ and her boyfriend’s career preferences for her (Vincent et al., 1998).
Men are also socialized into career choices. Society teaches men that career achievement is, in large part, the measure of their worth. Being the breadwinner is a crucial part of male identity, and a man’s success is often measured in dollars earned. This is also changing, however, although not as quickly as women’s roles in the workplace are changing. In the past few years, men have been entering more female-dominated fields, such as physical therapy and library science, and have also been taking on more childcare responsibilities (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 1999).
Although women comprise close to 50% of the workforce and 30% of management in large American corporations, less than 5% of senior managers are women (Powell, 1999). Women’s roles in the workplace have slowly been changing and more women are pursuing careers and are holding positions of responsibility and leadership. For example, although the percentage of working mothers was about 40% in 1970, it rose to over 70% by the late 1990s (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). Women have also been moving into more traditionally male-dominated fields, such as law, engineering, and architecture.
More and more women are pursuing professions and looking toward careers for at least part of their personal fulfillment. Although women received 5% of law degrees in 1970, they were awarded over 40% of law degrees by the mid-1990s (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 1999). Yet powerful pressures still exist for women to retain primary responsibility for home life, which means that women in high-pressure jobs may have more responsibility than men in similar jobs. One study found that although there are more women who are commercial air pilots today, many report experiencing discrimination and sexism on the job (Davey & Davidson, 2000).